PHILOSOPHY QUOTES III
quotations about philosophy
You could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?" -- A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised, careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
Philosophy should quicken life, not deaden it.
SUSAN GLASPELL
Little Masks
When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Theory of Knowledge
When philosophy has gone as far as she is able, she arrives at almightiness, and in that labyrinth is lost; where, not knowing the way, she goes on by guess, and cannot tell whether she is right or wrong.... She runs into Omnipotency; and, like a petty river, is swallowed in that boundless main.
OWEN FELLTHAM
Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political
The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold it, and how it affects what you do.
COLIN NYATHI
"The power of compound effort", NewsDay, April 27, 2016
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
These philosophers, then, whom we see not undeservedly exalted above the rest in fame and glory, have seen that no material body is God, and therefore they have transcended all bodies in seeking for God.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
In every philosophical discussion, conclusions turn on intuitions about what's right or wrong, plausible or implausible, something one would or would not say. Philosophy needs psychological experiments to understand how we're arriving at our conclusions.
JOSHUA GREENE
"Philosophers are using science and data points to test theories of morality", Quartz, March 28, 2016
Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS
Egeria: or Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods and Wayside
In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.
BERNARD LONERGAN
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.
ROBERT FULGHUM
"Robert Fulghum: Philosopher King", January Magazine
The wisdom of philosophy is set in opposition to the common sense of mankind. The first pretends to demonstrate, a priori, that there can be no such thing as a material world; that sun, moon, stars, and earth, vegetable and animal bodies, are, and can be nothing else, but sensations in the mind, or images of those sensations in the memory and imagination; that, like pain and joy, they can have no existence when they are not thought of. The last can conceive no otherwise of this opinion, than as a kind of metaphysical lunacy, and concludes that too much learning is apt to make men mad; and that the man who seriously entertains this belief, though in other respects he may be a very good man, as a man may be who believes that he is made of glass; yet, surely he hath a soft place in his understanding, and hath been hurt by much thinking.
THOMAS REID
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms
Our life is philosophy, and conversely, philosophy is life.
LANUSANGLA TZUDIR
Eastern Mirror, March 29, 2016
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
ERNEST GELLNER
Words and Things
You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
MAXIM GORKY
The Zykovs
Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes