Best 15727 quotes in «philosophy quotes» category

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.

(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakeable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.

Once I know who I'm not, then I'll know who I am.

... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like. v One could wish no easier death than that of Socrates, calmly discussing philosophy with his friends; one could fear nothing worse than that of Jesus, dying in torment, among the insults, the mockery, the curses of the whole nation. In the midst of these terrible sufferings, Jesus prays for his cruel murderers. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God.

Once you've fallen from classical virtue, won't have a soul for to wake up and hold you.

One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence.  Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […].  Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.

One could say that what differentiates ancient from modern philosophy is the fact that, in ancient philosophy, it was not only Chrysippus or Epicurus who, just because they had developed a philosophical discourse, were considered philosophers. Rather, every person who lived according to the precepts of Chrysippus or Epicurus was every bit as much a philosopher as they.

One connection I see between the work I did on philosophy and my work on technology is that both communities tend to mystify and create an atmosphere of complexity.

One day some people came to the master and asked: How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness or death? The master held up a glass and said: Someone gave me this glass; It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight. I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table. I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it - incredibly.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?

One may call the world a myth , in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

One of my central philosophies is to be creatively driven so I have to be extraordinarily creative in the way I get things done and I have to be really flexible. Striving for the best creativity can be a really moving target if you're trying to budget anything because if you come up with a better idea for something and it's going to make the movie stronger then you have to do it. And that's what I do. The difficulty is that you have to use more judgement as a producer then you might in other places. I have to make unbelievably great creative decisions.

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

One of my philosophies as a director is to listen to other people's great ideas because they'll help make you better.

One of my life philosophies is that you have a choice to make when you're doing something creative. You can be cheesy... or you can be lame.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of "Scholasticism," that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.

One of the great challenges you will face is that a part of the world, and some in it, do not have or do not believe in a standard of moral values. Many in the world today operate on the basis of practical expediency. You have undoubtedly observed this yourselves. It has become a philosophy of life for many. This is true among nations as well as among individuals.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

One of the main points of the philosophy behind parkour is being able to help people... To teach them they way themselves, to gain confidence in themselves, building up from simple moves to more complex things, to teach them that they are worthwhile people.

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.

One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.

One of the things I want to do in the book is to explore how philosophy can be done in literature. I start doing that in the first chapter, by introducing the idea of "philosophy by showing". What literature/philosophy shows is how to look at some important facets of life in a new way, thus changing the frame in which subsequent philosophical argument proceeds.

One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It’s a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn't’ knocking you around, life isn't controlling you. You have picked your place, you’ve picked your scene, you’ve picked your light, you’ve done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you.

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, lets all be friends in Washington philosophy.

One person will eat meat and it will lower their attention field. Another person won't even be affected by it because they're not in the state of mind whereby they'll be affected by it.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

One should turn towards the main ocean of the-beautiful-in-the-world so that one may by, contemplation of this Form, bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy.

One thing I really like about philosophy is that it's possible actually to do work in a wide range of different areas. I am particularly happy that I've even been able to do work in logic that has allowed me to use and develop my mathematical abilities, as well as to work on quite distant topics in philosophy of language and mind.

One way ... in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

On January 27, 2001, the focus of my career and the process of changing the desires of my heart all began. It was no longer about me but rather how I could impact others for the Kingdom. I officially was in the people business. That philosophy, combined with a warrior mentality, I believe, has endeared me to being labeled a positive clubhouse influence.