PHILOSOPHY QUOTES III
quotations about philosophy
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
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
A true philosopher is married to wisdom; he needs no other bride.
PROCLUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
For Hume, skepticism about metaphysical subjects ended in an indolence born of seclusion. The only solution was to transfer the skeptical impulse in philosophy from the solitude of the study to the wider social world. Under these circumstances, skepticism fostered equanimity rather than discontent. In society, the true skeptic acknowledged the value of common sense without submitting slavishly to its whims. Skepticism in this context was profitable and enabling; it criticized without destroying the conditions of criticism, which depended on the existence of society and government. The positive results of criticism could be seen in society, politics, and morals. Philosophy could expose damaging ideas in ethics, unsocial attitudes in religion, and dangerous postures in politics.
RICHARD BOURKE
"Hume's Call to Action", The Nation, April 20, 2016
Philosophy should quicken life, not deaden it.
SUSAN GLASPELL
Little Masks
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS
Egeria: or Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods and Wayside
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
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
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
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
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
You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
MAXIM GORKY
The Zykovs
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
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
ERNEST GELLNER
Words and Things
The part of human philosophy which is rational is of all knowledges, to the most wits, the least delightful, and seemeth but a net of subtlety and spinosity. For as it was truly said, that knowledge is pabulum animi; so in the nature of men's appetite to this food most men are of the taste and stomach of the Israelites in the desert, that would fain have returned ad ollas carnium, and were weary of manna; which, though it were celestial, yet seemed less nutritive and comfortable. So generally men taste well knowledges that are drenched in flesh and blood, civil history, morality, policy, about the which men's affections, praises, fortunes do turn and are conversant. But this same lumen siccum doth parch and offend most men's watery and soft natures. But to speak truly of things as they are in worth, rational knowledges are the keys of all other arts, for as Aristotle saith aptly and elegantly, "That the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms;" so these be truly said to be the art of arts. Neither do they only direct, but likewise confirm and strengthen; even as the habit of shooting doth not only enable to shoot a nearer shoot, but also to draw a stronger bow.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypothesis, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like questions.
ISAAC NEWTON
A Treatise on Physics
Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Our life is philosophy, and conversely, philosophy is life.
LANUSANGLA TZUDIR
Eastern Mirror, March 29, 2016