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The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

Book by Will Durant · 2 quotes · Philosophy, Spinoza, Kant

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The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers Quotes

“Voltaire rejects all systems, and suspects that “every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.” “The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.” “It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will." "Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

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Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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“But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.”

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Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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