Best 1483 quotes in «philosopher quotes» category

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.

Shouldn't I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not.

Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.

Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

...somehow the old philosophers could make even the most salacious topics seem boring.

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

Sometimes I suspect that there are two prototypes of philosophers who write about humans - I call them "celestials" and "terrestrials", without implying that celestials have their heads in the clouds or that terrestrials have theirs buried in the ground. The difference between these two types is not so much in their theories but in whether or not they would find it a very sad thing if it turned out that the only way a human is superior to a wolf is this: the human brain is significantly more capacious and complex.

Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets.

Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.

The best physician is also a philosopher.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.

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

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 classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

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

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

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

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 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: 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.

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

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 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.