Best 2580 quotes in «philosophical quotes» category

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.

As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do.

As Eastern thought has begun to interest a significant number of people, and meditation is no longer viewed with ridicule or suspicion, mysticism is being taken seriously even within the scientific community. An increasing number of scientists are aware that mystical thought provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of Contemporary science, a conception of the world in which the scientific discoveries of men and women can be in perfect harmony with their spiritual aims and religious beliefs.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

As for the ethics, law, and politics relationship, there has always been a tension for me as I try to keep them distinct while recognizing their interactions. A valuable contribution to my thinking there and elsewhere was Ellen Meiksins Wood's Mind and Politics, which reinforced for me the ways in which seemingly disparate philosophical endeavors were/are interconnected, and although I have tended to give a certain priority to ethical considerations as part of practical reasoning, I am reminded often enough that this position makes some contentious presumptions .

As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible.

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

A state arises,as I conceive,out of the needs of mankind;no one is self-sufficing,but all of us have many wants

As to how I would guide someone who is confused about the idea of God, I would suggest that he or she begins identifying what one might called "philosophical friends," - people with whom one could seriously examine our thought about God through listening to each other, reading important and useful books together and trying to think for oneself while familiarizing oneself with the ideas of some of the world's great thinkers. Cultivate openness without gullibility and skepticism without cynicism.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

At this time is freedom anything but the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

Bad men are full of repentance.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

Be content to seem what you really are.

Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it.

Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

Beloved, there are heights in experimental knowledge of the things of God that the eagles discerning eye and philosophical thought have never seen...God alone can take us there, but the chariot in which He takes us up and the fiery steeds that pull the chariot, are prevailing prayers.

Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

Beware of the person of one book.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

Beyond its practical aspects, gardening - be it of the soil or soul - can lead us on a philosophical and spiritual exploration that is nothing less than a journey into the depths of our own sacredness and the sacredness of all beings. After all, there must be something more mystical beyond the garden gate, something that satisfies the soul's attraction to beauty, peace, solace, and celebration.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

But, indeed, the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism.

But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more.

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected--so entirely novel--so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions--as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears.

But the philosophical and scientific process which I call 'secularization' necessarily involves the divesting of spiritual meaning from the world of nature; the desacralization of politics from human affairs; and the deconsecration of values from the human mind and conduct.