Quotes About Philosophy

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer

The ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory nor defeat, but in the perfection of the character of its participants

Here's your first problem, he said, pointing at a sentence. 'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.

Don't listen to people telling you that getting up early is best. René Descartes is one of history's most important philosophers, but he rarely got out of bed before noon - and when he started getting up early for a new job as a private tutor, it caused him to catch pneumonia and die.

My father lived by the philosophy, 'Be yourself, because everyone else is taken,' and he made sure I did, too. Whatever I wanted to do, he supported me. I don't mean that I was spoilt - he didn't believe in material gifts - but he watched my back while I worked to achieve things.

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

My father was an engineer and my mother was a social worker, and they met as young socialists. That probably tells you everything you need to know about my attitude to money - I've never really been bothered about it.

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

The Barrow Administration, with its misguided philosophy of big government wanting to own or control every facet of economic activity in Belize, has depressed and squeezed out the private sector. The inevitable result is mass firing of workers, foreclosures, and downsizing.

I resigned from the Marine Corps and flying in 1974, even though I loved them both. I quit because I no longer wanted to fight for peace. Instead, I believe we can build a more sustainable peace by working for prosperity.

I was brought up a working-class Tory. I believe, to be a true socialist, you have to be a capitalist first. In my heart, I'm a socialist; in my mind, I'm a capitalist.

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

When you really break it down to the way the world works, we're all little humans floating on a gas ball in the middle of space. That's the reality of our situation. And we've created these concepts and constructs that move us away from that.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.

Live and die in Aristotle's works.

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

If you're a doctor, what do you promise to do? First, do no harm. If your operating philosophy is do no harm, that's not a call to imagination. Not only that, if I'm a patient, I don't want your imagination. I want what works.