Quotes About Philosophy

So, your best defense is knowledge. It really is power, as they say...The more you know, the more easily you will develop your own philosophies about child rearing. When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice.

Read, listen, and learn constantly, but always sift what you learn through the strainer of your own personal beliefs and parenting philosophy.

The more you know, the more easily you will develop your own philosophies about child rearing. When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice.

We surrendered rather easily to yet another romantic notion: that meaning is to be found only in misery

The notion that obedience dehumanizes those who render it is a popular cry of the philosophers of radical individualism, such as Thoreau, who are so important to America's myth of itself.

Qué va a ocurrir ahora? Nada. Pues todo ha ocurrido ya. El tiempo entero es ahora, y el tiempo no puede ofrecer nada mejor. Nada puede ser más ahora que ahora, y antes de ahora nada era. No hay hechos menores en la vida, sólo existe un hecho, éste, único y colosal.

The temperament of a dandelion or cosmic preservation. Where does wonder begin?

Poetry, architecture, music, philosophy and mathematics all intrigued him and he was patron of them all, surrounding himself with men of genius: the poet and satirist Juvenal, the architect Apollodorus, the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Arrian, the writers Pliny the Younger, Pausanias and Plutarch.

She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

What a strange thing life is.

So much of life seems speculation.

Long ago he'd assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. on his grandfather's rood as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he'd discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn't so bad, considering how hard I was hit... And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

William Jennings Bryan, told the president that "the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy . . . that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion." It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, "among the Immortals.

Knowledge is power—all Scottish philosophers recognized this— and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.

The problem was, Albert never made that lack of conflict explicit. For all his staggering erudition, he was never tempted to join up the two great existing systems of wisdom in the Western world: the school of Aristotle and Greek science and that of Plato and his Christian disciples, including Saint Augustine. That was the task Aquinas decided to undertake once he received his license to teach at the University of Paris in 1256.

The work Aquinas did in the next sixteen years changed the face of Western Christianity and philosophy.

the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica. These last two alone total a stupefying two million words. They are a monumental fusion of learning and faith, and a reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, without parallel even in the works of Saint Augustine. In fact, together they make Aquinas the one Christian thinker whose system can stand beside those of Aristotle and Plato—in part because it is a brilliant synthesis of the best of both thinkers.

In page after page of the Summa, Aquinas will calmly and tentatively assert a position. Then he looks around at all the counterpositions and objections. He examines whether they hold up under scrutiny; if not, he quietly refutes them and moves on to the next question. At one stroke, a Christian dialectic was born, more sophisticated than Abelard's and more all-embracing than Anselm's, because it stands on a reading of Aristotle's entire corpus.

For every quality in life—goodness, justice, courage, beauty, loyalty—there has to exist a single standard, a model of perfection of which, Socrates says, "all equal objects of sense Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are only imperfect copies.

Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

God is always doing geometry. —Saying attributed to Plato