Philosopher Quotations | Page 3

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he's a universalist.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Then I think the sense of it being one community breaks down; but if you know instantly and respond within twenty-four hours, it's a very different sort of situation.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

I don't have any specific role model. I admire anyone who is strong, confident, intelligent.

Much can often be learned by the repetition under different conditions, even if the desired result is not obtained.

Since, however, it is immaterial whether the work is done by assistants or a machine, I decided to build a machine equivalent to an array of about 200 separating funnels.

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

So it's clear from whence the history of philosophy is the inner movement of the course of spirit, that is, of absolute subjectivity, towards itself.

The primordial experiences that are transmitted through art and history are not to be grasped from the points of view of these forms of consciousness.

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.

God has linked together all His works, though He has not on that account produced in them entities charged with the function of union.

God is related to the universe, as Creator and Preserver; the laws by which He created all things are those by which He preserves them.

But the church cannot confer the necessary gifts for this ministry, and cannot prescribe for God those upon whom he should confer them.

I have been enjoying my return to modeling. That's where my career started many years ago.

I maintain that today many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

I agree totally with Metheny regarding the sound influencing the way you play.

Look at my own case: I am the father in my family. It is my duty to enforce the Shariah in my family and I do so with an iron hand.

Some of the things that I'm trying to do are to strengthen those other forces, and give them a better chance of having some influence.

People who listen to the music for the music and are adventurous in their playing tend to dig it, those who have a narrower perspective don't.

Playboy was a wonderful experience and a great opportunity for me.

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

I might well have written a different book in some respects had I been writing it now. But I wouldn't really go back on things I had said.

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.

Out of the fullness of this presence of mind, disturbed by no ulterior motive, the artist who is released from all attachment must practice his art.

It is a different and independent thing, and the character of the mental act only determines how much of the object is apprehended and in what form.

You know already that most of the lusts and licentiousness of the multitude consist in an appetite for eating, drinking and sexual intercourse.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

Thus we have to recognize that a thing as perceived contains besides sensory elements other elements present to the mind only in ideal form.

I would never discourage anyone from doing what it is in life that they want to do. But I would encourage them to find out the pros and cons of anything they become involved in.

I would like to take this opportunity to record here my belief that one should take a minimum of care and preparation over first experiments.

I would just like to get him to think about these things; whether what's happening in Iraq is promoting the culture of life. The worry is that he is so certain that he know where he's going to lead the country.

The art of measurement, by showing us the truth would have brought our soul into the repose of abiding by the truth, and so would have saved our life.

The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

[W]here other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

...somehow the old philosophers could make even the most salacious topics seem boring.

The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.

There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Those who never philosophized until they met with disappointments, have mostly become disappointed philosophers

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known. This was the sound conclusion of the Academic sceptics, who were the least surly of philosophers.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils." Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.

Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.

The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.

There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.

There are not many people within the WWF that I am contact with.

There is a continuum which starts with direct sensory observations and proceeds to enormously complex, indirect methods of observation.

Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher - for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.

A philosopher's a lover of wisdom.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

At this point I have no interest in returning to wrestling. I am pursuing my acting career. But I never say never. I enjoyed the three years I was in the wrestling industry.

What phenomenology wants, in all these investigations, is to establish what admits of being stated with the universal validity of theory.

The worship which directs itself toward God as our good regards him either as he is ours at present, in faith, or as he is to be ours, in hope.

You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

The solar industry needs stable markets. With fair and good incentives we can have solar power competitive in ten year's time.

The synth allows me to breathe with woodwind and brass players and opens up phrasing possibilities not possible with standard guitar.

Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

Pure thought is itself the divine existence; and conversely, the divine existence, in its immediate essence, is nothing else than pure thought.

After a couple years of occasional lessons with Pass I moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory.

Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God.

So the compromise itself is within ethics rather than between competing ethics, and I think that's true in geo-political concerns.

A man's conscience and his judgement is the same thing; and as the judgement, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

They that approve a private opinion, call it an opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Psychology, on the other hand, is science of psychic Nature and, therefore, of consciousness as Nature or as real event in the spatiotemporal world.