PHILOSOPHY QUOTES II
quotations about philosophy
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, New Statesman, October 8, 2013
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES
Some Problems of Philosophy
Divine philosophy weeds from our breast by degrees full many a vice and every kind of error; she is the first to teach us what is right.
JUVENAL
attributed, Great Thoughts from Classic Authors
Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Any philosophy that can fit into a nutshell belongs there.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
attributed, Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy
The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society.
HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON
Memoire sur la science de l'homme
Nor may a philosopher, any more than a poet, be a mere link in a chain: he must be a staple firmly and deeply fixt in the adamantine walls of Truth. If he rightly deserves the name, his mind must be impregnated with some of the primordial ideas, of life and being, man and nature, fate and freedom, order and law, thought and will, power and God. He may have received them from others; but he must receive them as seeds: they must teem and germinate within him, and mingle with the essence of his spirit, and must shape themselves into a new original growth. He who merely takes a string of propositions from former writers, and busies himself in drawing fresh inferences from them, may be a skilful logician or psychologer, but has no claim to the high title of a philosopher.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
It is unfortunately very difficult to describe the nature of philosophy in a small compass; the only satisfaction that an author can draw from the attempt to do so lies in the knowledge that an answer to the question "What is philosophy?" is apt to seem persuasive only to the extent that it is brief. The more one ponders over the qualifications that any reasoned answer must contain, the more one is driven to the conclusion that this question is itself one of the principal subjects of philosophical thinking.
ROGER SCRUTON
Short History of Modern Philosophy
The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Among all the characters of mankind, that of the Philosopher is the most perfect. Distinguished from those of the inferior kind, by clearer and more distinct perceptions; by more comprehensive views of both nature and art; by a more ardent love and higher admiration of what is excellent; by a firmer attachment to virtue, and the general good of the world; by a lower regard for all inferior beauties compared with the supreme, consisting in rectitude of conduct and dignitude of behaviour; by a greater moderation in prosperity, and greater patience and courage under the evils of life; the real Philosopher, though not absolutely perfect, sets the grandeur of human genius in the fairest light.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
You could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
The sole function of philosophy is to lead us to happiness by way of the shortest possible route.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus
A mind rightly instituted in the school of philosophy, acquires at once the stability of the oak and the flexibility of the osier.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Citizen of the World
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
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
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
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook C", Aphorisms