Best 1483 quotes in «philosopher quotes» category

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.

The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

The human mind is not, as philosophers would have you think, a debating hall, but a picture gallery.

The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers.

Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.

The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.

The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils." Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.

The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.

The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.

The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.

The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

The philosopher: he alone knows how to live for himself. He is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing: how to live.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.

The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

The quarrels of theologians and philosophers have not been about religion, but about philosophy; and philosophers not unfrequently seem to entertain the same feeling toward theologians that sportsmen cherish toward poachers.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

Therefore, even the lover of myth is a philosopher; for myth is composed of wonder.

There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician.

There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now but that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent. What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That.

There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

There's no precedent for women philosophers and there's no precedence for most of the things I did.

There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

The technology [semiconductors] which has transformed practical existence is largely an application of what was discovered by these allegedly irresponsible [natural] philosophers.

The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.

The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward.

The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of "in virtue of" relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties.