Quotes About Philosophy

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

tapping Zeno's

In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom."]·

In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.

He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this -- that he knows nothing yet.

But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.

To be free is not to live in no place and at no time but to live in one place as in the shadow of all places, and to live in one time as in the morning twilight of eternity.

We do not know what or how to teach children, because we do not know what a child is, and we do not know what a child is, because we do not know what man is -- and Him from whom and for whom man is.

Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus)

The sage's point was that life was uncertain and no one should be counted happy till the day of his death.

As Cicero drily put it: "We must apply to our fellow-countrymen for virtue, but for our culture to the Greeks.

we have learned from them the beginnings of life and have gained the power not only to live happily but also to die with a better hope.

virtue outweighs everything and even if the good man is not supremely happy, he is on balance happy.

Either the future is subject to chance—in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other—or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it.

Either the future is subject to chance--in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other--or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it." --Quintus Tullius Cicero

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume's scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.

A small but typical example of how 'philosophy' sends out new shoots is to be found in the case of Georg Cantor, a nineteenth-century German mathematician. His research on the subject of infinity was at first written off by his scientific colleagues as mere 'philosophy' because it seemed so bizarre, abstract and pointless. Now it is taught in schools under the name of set-theory.

There were three main new schools of thought: the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Sceptics. On the whole, if an Epicurean said one thing, a Stoic would say the opposite and a Sceptic would refuse to commit himself either way.

Unii povestesc c?, în timp ce Socrate p?r?sea curtea, un admirator devotat, dar cam n?tâng, a început s? se vaite, cel mai greu de suportat pentru el fiind faptul c? Socrate a fost condamnat la moarte pe nedrept. «Cum, r?spunse Socrate, încercând s?-l lini?teasc?, ai fi preferat s? fiu condamnat în mod drept?»

Descartes's grandiose ambitions even extended to "a system of medicine founded on infallible demonstrations." He once said that the preservation of health had always been "the principal end of my studies,

What I am is a thinking soul, not a piece of matter, and I know about this soul and its thoughts better than I know about any physical thing. Because

was "to try always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world.