Best 1483 quotes in «philosopher quotes» category

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

Plato used to say to Xenocrates the philosopher, who was rough and morose, "Good Xenocrates, sacrifice to the Graces.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

Problems come and go over time, and to understand why is a difficult historical task. If one wanted to find the origin of a problem, historical research and close attention to texts is what is needed, not unconstrained speculation about the 'pictures' that philosophers must be in the grip of.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

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

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

Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best physician is also a philosopher.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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.

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

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