Quotes About Philosophy

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

A life without tragedy would not be worth living. We

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.

This sect (the Encyclopaedists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning; success the rule of right and wrong, honesty as an affair of taste or decency: and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.))

Il faut absolument que la Superstition et le Fanatisme fassent place a la Philosophie. (It must necessarily happen that superstition and fanaticism give place to philosophy.) Kings persecute persons, priests opinion. Without kings, men must be safe; and without priests, minds must be free.

The Ides are come, not gone." "Tush! if he is a soothsayer, you are not Caesar. It is your vanity that makes you credulous. Thank Heaven, I do not think myself of such importance that the operations of Nature should be changed in order to frighten me." "But why should the operations of Nature be changed? There may be a deeper philosophy than we dream of, — a philosophy that discovers the secrets of Nature, but does not alter, by penetrating, its courses.

Poor Jerry. He's giving all of himself to something he's got to loose. -So does everybody...sooner or later. -Freeze on that. -On what? -On all that heavy philosophy bullshit. I'm talking about here and now and everyday important things that people live by. If you extrapolate everything-nothing matters.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

The best philosophy doesn't just come up with a few new facts that we can simply add yo our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend our list of dos and don'ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a set of values.

The best philosophy doesn't just come up with a few new facts that we can simply add to our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend our list of dos and don'ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a set of values.

Socrates: what will happen to my children if I do what my friends are suggesting? Hume: you can't always believe what other people tell you. Descartes: when there's so much disagreement between the authorities, what can we do but go back to basics and start again?

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

In 80% of Socrates' dialogues there was no constructive outcome. He saw his role as simply pointing out what was "wrong.

Het is natuurlijk om dingen te willen snappen, dat is een heel menselijke drang, maar soms valt er - op een bepaalde manier - niets te snappen.

In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton," one historian wrote, "the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Even supremely able and ambitious men quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers. "When one ... compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet who had compiled an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.

First, as I have said, the distinction between natural science and the philosophy of nature is not always observed in practice by either philosophers or scientists. Nor is it desirable that investigations in these areas be kept rigorously separate.

I have said that the philosophy of nature is concerned with the most general features of empirical and material reality. Other expositions written from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view often characterize the field instead as concerned with changeable reality (though some earlier writers do characterize it the way I have, e.g. Bittle 1941, p. 13).

the moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.

philosophy of nature, albeit a rival to the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Hence to characterize the very field of the philosophy of nature as essentially concerned with change might seem to beg the question in favor of the Aristotelian approach. Better to characterize it instead in terms of what both sides agree upon, viz. the existence of the empirical and material world.

Change just is the realization of some potentiality; or as Aquinas puts it, "motion is the actuality of a being in potency

God is real, unless declared integer.