Quotes About Philosophy

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Since human wisdom cannot secure us from accidents, it is the greatest effort of reason to bear them well.

I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

I also like to look at the dynamic that takes place between religion and science because, in a way, both are asking the same questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The methodologies are diametrically opposed, but their motivation is the same; the wellspring is the same in both cases.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

To me, both the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto contain underlying truths, but the West doesn't permit a middle road.

Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

The idea that Buddhism denies what is called in the West 'individual immortality' is a mistake, so far as the Buddhist scriptures are concerned.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

We must strive to encourage East and West not only to move towards each other but also to encourage them to find a new philosophy, a philosophy which will serve as a tool determining the future of Planet Earth - our common and only shelter.

I was born Muslim, but for a large part of my life, I wasn't necessarily raised Muslim. My father always kept everything around us, from Western philosophy to Eastern philosophy.

When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

In student government in high school, I learned how to deal with people, and in college I studied Eastern philosophy. I'm also an avid team-sports fan. I think I just blended them all together and came out with a business management philosophy that combines the Eastern ethic with the Western sport concept, basically.

We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

The birthplace of 'Western' civilization is generally agreed to be Greece, and its birth date is generally agreed to be some time during the 6th century B.C.E. Obviously, there is not one single dramatic moment that definitively started the whole thing.

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it's in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It's about oneness.