Quotes About Philosophy

He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn't make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.

Life is short and the number of books is appalling.

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!

only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.

Men are men, but Man is a woman. —Chesterton

In the twilight of the world that we inhabit there will come to some on soft, silent wings a strange understanding: that things have not always been the way they are, and that therefore they need not always be as they have been. And Hegel says that this understanding is itself the sign that indeed the night is coming, that maybe the morning will be ours to see." Hegel

Circumference = nowhere; center point =

George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg.

We have never explained the numerical value of any of the constants of Nature.

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

Most scientists and mathematicians operate as if Platonism is true regardless of whether they believe that it is. That is, they work as though there were an unknown realm of truth to be discovered.

Anselm conceives of God as something than which nothing greater or more perfect can be conceived. Since this idea arises in our minds it certainly has an intellectual existence. But does it have an existence outside of our minds? Anselm argued that it must, for otherwise we fall into a contradiction. For we could imagine something greater than that which nothing greater can be conceived; that is the mental conception we have together, plus the added attribute of real existence.

The Enlightenment dared us to think, but there will always be a religion and a God for those who wouldn't dare.

The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world by what the Aufklärer called "reason" and Kant called the conditions of possibility, transporting us toward the impossible. Today, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are all dead but God is doing just fine, thank you very much.

Nietzsche had it right when he said we lack the courage for the truth, that the truth will make us stronger just so long as it doesn't kill us first.

After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.

There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.

Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.

The atomic doctrine with Democritus' thoroughgoing undertaking to substitute a quantitative185 for a qualitative conception of matter with the location of the qualitative aspects of the world in the experience of the soul appealed only to the Epicurean who used the theory as an exorcism to drive out of the universe the spirits which disturbed the calm of the philosopher.

Platon bir defas?nda köleyi baÅŸkalar?n?n amaçlar?n? gerçekleÅŸtiren kiÅŸi olarak tan?mlam??t?r ve daha önce belirttiÄŸimiz üzere kendi arzular?n?n tutsa?? olmuÅŸ bir kiÅŸi de asl?nda bir köledir.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.