A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A pharisee is hard on others and easy on himself, but a spiritual man is easy on others and hard on himself.”
“A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.”
Source: Gravity and Grace
“A PhD in Mathematics is three years of guessing it wrong, plus one week of getting it right and writing a dissertation.”
“A PHD is not the end of education. Education exists even among the bees who feed their queen only with the purest.”
“A phenomenal woman is never limited by a phenomenon. She goes out there, and stay the course until she prospers.”
Source: Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman
“A phenomenal woman is never limited by a phenomenon. She goes out there and stays the course until she prospers.”
Source: Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman
“A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing.”
“A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.”
Source: The Place of Dead Roads: A Novel
“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.”
“A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.”
Source: Les Miserables Volume One
“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
Source: Darkness visible: a memoir of madness
“A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.”
“A philanderer cannot be a parent - a parent cannot be a philanderer.”
Source: Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.”
Source: Lectures on Russian Literature
“A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“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.”
“A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.”
“A philosopher and honest journalist? Does he plan to die of hunger?”
Source: Marx for Beginners
“A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered, Opportunity!”
“A philosopher has remarked that if a man knew that he had thirty years of life before him, it would not be an unwise thing to spend twenty of those in mapping out a plan of living and putting himself under rule; for he would do more with the ten well-arranged years than with the whole thirty if he spent them at random. There is much truth in that saying. A man will do little by firing off his gun if he has not
learned to take aim.”
“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”
“A philosopher is a deep thinker and a meticulous observer of nature and events that reveal the beauty, truth, and meaning of existence.”
“A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked of after he is dead.”
“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”
“A philosopher is a man who can look at an empty glass with a smile.”
“A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.”
“A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.”
Source: Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969
“A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.”
“A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.”
Source: Philosophical works
“A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.”
Source: Sophie's World
“A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.”
Source: The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812
“A philosopher may try to prove the truth of something he believed before he was a philosopher, but even if he succeeds, his belief never regain the untroubled character, and the settled place in his mind, which it had at first.”
“A philosopher might find the general work unsophisticated, and scientists are often bemused by esoteric talk of zombies, supervenience, and possible worlds.”
“A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. "If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."
Diogenes replied, "But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus.”
“A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.”
Source: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human"?”
“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.”
“A philosopher once noted that people long for immortality but run out of things to do on a rainy afternoon.”
“A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'”
“A philosopher once said, 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results.' Well, they don't!”
“A philosopher operates with deductions. A sophist operates with paradoxes. A "public intellectual" operates with buzzwords.”
“A philosopher philosophizes what people need to hear. A motivational speaker speaks what people want to hear.”
“A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.”
“A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'”
“A philosopher will not believe what he sees because he is too busy speculating about what he does not see.”
“A philosopher's a lover of wisdom.”
“A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence.
As a human being you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.”
“A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”
Source: Philosophical writings
“A philosophical discussion ensued about right and wrong, and good and bad. Also about things to be ashamed of and things to be feel guilty about.
Could anything carried out between two consensual adults be wrong? And why should they be embarrassed by something a loving partner wanted to try?
Right then they made a pact to never lie to each other, and to live out their sexual fantasies together.
If two intelligent, loving and happily married people couldn't be honest with each other about their most hidden sexual desires, then who could?”
Source: What Wendy Wants