Quotes About Philosophy

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.

the seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.

The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

His solution, beautiful and unattainable, was philosopher-kings.

insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth,

The Republic cured me of the Republic.

William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.

If we suppose for a moment that space exists, and that God placed the world in it, why did He place it in the spot it occupies instead of any other spot, all space being alike, and no one point being preferable to any other point? God acted without having a reason, for if space is, His choice of a place was arbitrary; but God cannot act irrationally. Therefore space is not.

If reason has never been able to found a religion which will bear criticism, it is because of this, that it begins with an undemonstrable hypothesis and ends in an hypothesis. Consequently, all attempts to prove the existence of God are convincing only to those already convinced.

Consequently our idea of the Deity is that of the archetype of our own minds.

When we say that God is infinite, we do not mean that He is of immeasurable size and duration, but that He is beyond all space and time. He is neither in space nor in time; for this reason He is eternal and infinite, and therefore He is also incomprehensible.

Man and God being placed face to face, one as contingent, the other as absolute, the contingent lives as contingent and the absolute as absolute. To live as absolute, is to be at once the power and principle of life; to live as contingent is to live as effect, without ever being able to live as principle.

Evil is the rejection of the infinite for the finite.

Every religion is the expression of a want of man's spiritual nature, however uncouth or exaggerated may be the form it assumes. This uncouthness or exaggeration is due to negation of correlative wants. The want itself is the strain after a truth, the hunger of the spiritual nature. The Incarnation assumes to satisfy every one of these wants, and therefore must become a web, of which all philosophies are the warp, and all religions are the woof.

The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.

God's existence escapes demonstration; it is idle to ask reason to prove what is beyond its scope, for reason is the faculty of dealing with the finite.

Reason starts from itself to return to itself.

The God of reason cannot be the object of religion.

It has been said that he is a fool who works for philosophy instead of making philosophy work for him; but a man cannot give to the world even a little of a true philosophy without reaping sevenfold himself.

I know a logic beyond time and space; that is why I am so illogical, why space cannot hold me nor time make me old.

Philosophy will go on being taught in the world and all over the world. Only a few, perhaps, will reach the deeps of it in this life; but a seed sown to-day may bear fruit long hence.