quotations about philosophy
If your divines are not philosophers, your philosophy will neither be divine, nor able to divine.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.
HORACE BUSHNELL
Sermons for the New Life
The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
lecture, "Year of Distraction"
Sublime Philosophy!
Thou art the patriarch's ladder, reaching heaven;
And bright with beckoning angels--but alas!
We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams,
By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
Man is a philosopher in spite of himself.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
Across the Night of Paganism, Philosophy flitted on, like the Lantern-fly of the Tropics, a Light to itself, and an Ornament, but alas! no more than an ornament, of the surrounding Darkness.
STEPHEN TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Aids to Reflection
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
J. M. COETZEE
interview, Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1992
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
R. D. LAING
Reason and Violence
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
DR. SEUSS
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
The philosophical problems that can be solved from the armchair have already been solved.
JOSHUA GREENE
"Philosophers are using science and data points to test theories of morality", Quartz, March 28, 2016
A philosopher ... is not fairly judged by his eccentricities, nor by the frailties to which he is liable; still less should his philosophy as a whole fall into ill-repute because of those among its devotees who have stumbled into wells, or who aimlessly pass their lives in whetting their faculties and then neglecting to use them.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils -- no, nor the human race, as I believe -- and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.
PLATO
The Republic
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect ... What is philosophy today ... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Occasions
Since the prolonged study of human philosophy -- which God has made empty and foolish, as the Apostle says, when that study lacks the flavouring of divine wisdom and the light of revealed truth -- sometimes leads to error rather than to the discovery of the truth, we ordain and rule by this salutary constitution, in order to suppress all occasions of falling into error with respect to the matters referred to above, that from this time onwards none of those in sacred orders, whether religious or seculars or others so committed, when they follow courses in universities or other public institutions, may devote themselves to the study of philosophy or poetry for longer than five years after the study of grammar and dialectic, without their giving some time to the study of theology or pontifical law. Once these five years are past, if someone wishes to sweat over such studies, he may do so only if at the same time, or in some other way, he actively devotes himself to theology or the sacred canons; so that the Lord's priests may find the means, in these holy and useful occupations, for cleansing and healing the infected sources of philosophy and poetry.
POPE LEO X
Papal bull condemning every proposition contrary to the truth of the enlightened Christian faith, Apostolici Regiminis, December 19, 1513
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims