115 quotes about Philosophers and Philosophy
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Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists -- in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.
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Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
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We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
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In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.
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What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
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A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
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All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
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Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
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Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.
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Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
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One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.
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All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
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Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates -- but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
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Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
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The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.
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Tell me what gives a man or woman their greatest pleasure and I'll tell you their philosophy of life.
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To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
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Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.
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A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
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The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
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There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.
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Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.
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Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.
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There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
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Philosophers are only men in armor after all.
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The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
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Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?
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And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.
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I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.
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Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
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If you set your heart upon philosophy, you must straightway prepare yourself to be laughed at and mocked by many who will say Behold a philosopher arisen among us! or How came you by that brow of scorn? But do you cherish no scorn, but hold to those things which seem to you the best, as one set by God in that place. Remember too, that if you abide in those ways, those who first mocked you, the same shall afterwards reverence you; but if you yield to them, you will be laughed at twice as much as before.
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As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.
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I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.
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If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.
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Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
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Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
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The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.
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There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.
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The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.
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Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
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If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
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All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
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Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.
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Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.
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In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.
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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.
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If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
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When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
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I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full and scratch where it itches.
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In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
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There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.
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Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
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Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.
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Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
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There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.
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Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
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How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns.
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Philosophy is doubt.
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Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
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In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
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The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.
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Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say thus it shall be!, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past -- they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their knowing is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is -- will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?
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Plato was a bore.
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Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.
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To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.
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Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
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Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
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Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
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Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.
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Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.
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The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.
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Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.
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