Best 2580 quotes in «philosophical quotes» category

Creationists often appeal to the facts of science to support their view, and evolutionists often appeal to philosophical assumptions from outside science.

Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

Dancers are the athletes of God.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

Democracy passes into despotism.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Despite all philosophical differences, all major world religions have the same potential to create good human beings.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Do not yield to misfortunes, but advance more boldly to meet them, as your fortune permits you.

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.

Dreams ought to produce no conviction whatever on philosophical minds. If we consider how many dreams are dreamt every night, and how many events occur every day, we shall no longer wonder at those accidental coincidences which ignorance mistakes for verifications.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle...

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter.

Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.

Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.

Epistemology now flourishes with various complementary approaches. This includes formal epistemology, experimental philosophy, cognitive science and psychology, including relevant brain science, and other philosophical subfields, such as metaphysics, action theory, language, and mind. It is not as though all questions of armchair, traditional epistemology are already settled conclusively, with unanimity or even consensus. We still need to reason our way together to a better view of those issues.

Eventually, Aristotle appeared among the Greeks. He improved the methods of logic and systematized its problems and details. He assigned to logic its proper place as the first philosophical discipline and the introduction to philosophy. Therefore he is called the First Teacher.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.

Every calamity is to be overcome by endurance.

Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Everyone has an enemy. It's why God gave us baseball bats. Well, He gave us trees, but we knew what He meant.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

Every noble action is selfish. Some selfish actions are nobler than others. But they are all selfish. And as such there can be no action purely noble anyway. Even the nobility in God's great philosophical intentions is bounded by his vanity.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical “proof.” It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.