Quotes About Philosophy

Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty.

Diogenes struck the father when the son swore.

That which Pythagoras said to his scholars of old, may be forever applied to melancholy men, A fabis abstinete, eat no beans.

He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.

I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva's tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.

Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.

Cogito ergo dim sum. (Therefore I think these are pork buns.)

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.

Never and forever are usually neither

Ideas give life meaning. Our minds need ideas the way our bodies need food. We are starved for visions, hungry for understanding. We are caught up in the routines of life, distracted occasionally by those activities we call "recreation" and "entertainment." What we as a nation have lost is the joy of thinking, the challenge of understanding, the inspirations as well as the consolations of philosophy.

Never mention the name of anything concrete and volatile. This is really just a restatement of the principle itself.

If Hegel could not be taught to ordinary intelligent people, then I for one would not find reason to read him at all.

Hegel calls the truth of his Phenomenology a "bacchanalian revel"; it is, in other words, an orgy of ideas, a conceptual debauch.

To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.

Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.

I want to emphasize the second Hegel, the Heraclitan Hegel, the Hegel of endless change, and what he calls "the bad infinity," running on without end. This is the Hegel who said, in effect, that there is no unity except through differences and there is no end to philosophy.

Teaching philosophy isn't what I do. Teaching philosophy is, sort of, what I am.

Philosophy is all about our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and the world. Doing philosophy, therefore, is first of all the activity of stating, as clearly and as convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we believe in.

The point is that the mind was philosophically awakened, that it felt the need for a coherent overall philosophical image of the world. To young Djugashvili, it was quite evidently a mark of Marxism's special strength as a socialist ideology that it had dialectical materialism—"an entire world-view"—as its matrix.

Although Lenin did not directly take issue with it, his own outlook differed radically.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.

One of the first things I learned when I began teaching courses in critical thinking in 1974 was that those of us trained in philosophy needed to supplement our philosophical training with the study of various cognitive, perceptual, and affective biases or illusions. We had a lot to learn from the social scientists if we were to teach our students to think critically. Identifying fallacies, learning to test deductive arguments for validity, and the like would not be enough.

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.