Quotes About Philosophy

The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

So there is an issue—or a dualistic aspect of our desire for human perfection or at least progress—that begs for resolution. But I learned years ago that in this kind of no-win philosophical situation, there is probably a higher perspective that dissolves, rather than resolves, the dissonance. In other words, being versus doing may not be the issue.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henry Bergson

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds. —Thomas Sowell

Life is what it is, Alex. You just have to accept it, because you have no other choice.

sort of thing. Think you

think we've all

For a century, environmentalism has divided itself into warring camps: conservationists versus preservationists.... The struggle pits those who would meddle with nature against those who would leave it be.... The only sensible way forward lies in a melding of the two philosophies. If nature has grown artificial, then restoring wilderness requires human intervention. We must manage nature in order to leave it alone.

It's interesting that many of the best instructors in early America were Scottish Presbyterians. As historian George Marsden affirmed, "[I]t is not much of an exaggeration to say that outside of New England, the Scots were the educators of eighteenth-century America."7 These Scottish instructors regularly tutored students in what was known as the Scottish Common Sense educational philosophy –

There was indeed a clear difference between the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats on the issue of race and racial equality. Southern Democrats had been willing to form an entire nation on the foundation of white supremacy – and there was no doubt that the South was strongly Democratic.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." The lame and the blind excepted, who could object?

No very good sense can be given to the idea that the elements of Euclidean geometry may be found in nature because either everything is found in nature or nothing is. Euclidean geometry is a theory, and the elements of a theory may be interpreted only in terms demanded by the theory itself. Euclid's axioms are satisfied in the Euclidean plane. Nature has nothing to do with it.

Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell. Libertarianism holds out the goal not of a perfect society but of a better and freer one. It

One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.

If one considers this question carefully, one can see that in a certain sense the East was right to see the immeasurable as the primary reality. For, as has already been indicated, measure is an insight created by man. A reality that is beyond man and prior to him cannot depend on such insight.

Buddhist philosophy, notion of mutually dependent origination, everything originates together, mutually dependent. it is close to implicate order, which says that everything comes out of a good and everything is interrelated, and that underlying it there is no substance that can be defined. that also give rise to karma, but karma too becomes changeable since even our own state of mind is part of the whole, and when it changes, the whole changes, so the karma changes.

The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables.

It is a most important characteristic of the mechanistic philosophy, however, that it permits one to make a limitless number of adjustments in his detailed point of view, without giving up what is essential to the mechanistic position.

By using the term 'thinking substance' in such sharp contrast to 'extended substance' [Descartes] was clearly implying that the various distinct forms appearing in thought do not have their existence in such an order of extension and separation (i.e., some kind of space), but rather in a different order, in which extension and separations have no fundamental significance.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have. David Bowie

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously. (2012)

I'm just a cosmic yob, I suppose.