PHILOSOPHY QUOTES II
quotations about philosophy
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, New Statesman, October 8, 2013
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES
Some Problems of Philosophy
Among all the characters of mankind, that of the Philosopher is the most perfect. Distinguished from those of the inferior kind, by clearer and more distinct perceptions; by more comprehensive views of both nature and art; by a more ardent love and higher admiration of what is excellent; by a firmer attachment to virtue, and the general good of the world; by a lower regard for all inferior beauties compared with the supreme, consisting in rectitude of conduct and dignitude of behaviour; by a greater moderation in prosperity, and greater patience and courage under the evils of life; the real Philosopher, though not absolutely perfect, sets the grandeur of human genius in the fairest light.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Civilizations ultimately run on ideas, and societies that want to prosper should, so to speak, work out them out, manipulating their intellectual muscles regularly.
PASCAL-EMMANUEL GOBRY
"France's strange, wonderful love affair with philosophy", The Week, April 18, 2016
The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypothesis, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like questions.
ISAAC NEWTON
A Treatise on Physics
Divine philosophy weeds from our breast by degrees full many a vice and every kind of error; she is the first to teach us what is right.
JUVENAL
attributed, Great Thoughts from Classic Authors
Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
attributed, Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy
Nor may a philosopher, any more than a poet, be a mere link in a chain: he must be a staple firmly and deeply fixt in the adamantine walls of Truth. If he rightly deserves the name, his mind must be impregnated with some of the primordial ideas, of life and being, man and nature, fate and freedom, order and law, thought and will, power and God. He may have received them from others; but he must receive them as seeds: they must teem and germinate within him, and mingle with the essence of his spirit, and must shape themselves into a new original growth. He who merely takes a string of propositions from former writers, and busies himself in drawing fresh inferences from them, may be a skilful logician or psychologer, but has no claim to the high title of a philosopher.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook C", Aphorisms
Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?" -- A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised, careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold it, and how it affects what you do.
COLIN NYATHI
"The power of compound effort", NewsDay, April 27, 2016
For Hume, skepticism about metaphysical subjects ended in an indolence born of seclusion. The only solution was to transfer the skeptical impulse in philosophy from the solitude of the study to the wider social world. Under these circumstances, skepticism fostered equanimity rather than discontent. In society, the true skeptic acknowledged the value of common sense without submitting slavishly to its whims. Skepticism in this context was profitable and enabling; it criticized without destroying the conditions of criticism, which depended on the existence of society and government. The positive results of criticism could be seen in society, politics, and morals. Philosophy could expose damaging ideas in ethics, unsocial attitudes in religion, and dangerous postures in politics.
RICHARD BOURKE
"Hume's Call to Action", The Nation, April 20, 2016
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
ERNEST GELLNER
Words and Things
In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.
BERNARD LONERGAN
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations
Our life is philosophy, and conversely, philosophy is life.
LANUSANGLA TZUDIR
Eastern Mirror, March 29, 2016
The part of human philosophy which is rational is of all knowledges, to the most wits, the least delightful, and seemeth but a net of subtlety and spinosity. For as it was truly said, that knowledge is pabulum animi; so in the nature of men's appetite to this food most men are of the taste and stomach of the Israelites in the desert, that would fain have returned ad ollas carnium, and were weary of manna; which, though it were celestial, yet seemed less nutritive and comfortable. So generally men taste well knowledges that are drenched in flesh and blood, civil history, morality, policy, about the which men's affections, praises, fortunes do turn and are conversant. But this same lumen siccum doth parch and offend most men's watery and soft natures. But to speak truly of things as they are in worth, rational knowledges are the keys of all other arts, for as Aristotle saith aptly and elegantly, "That the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms;" so these be truly said to be the art of arts. Neither do they only direct, but likewise confirm and strengthen; even as the habit of shooting doth not only enable to shoot a nearer shoot, but also to draw a stronger bow.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society.
HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON
Memoire sur la science de l'homme
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
A true philosopher is married to wisdom; he needs no other bride.
PROCLUS
attributed, Day's Collacon