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Philosophy Quotes

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Philosophy Quotes

“While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.”

KnowsShouldPhilosophyScienceCertainKnowledgeKnowingIgnoranceOughtConceptsAffairPracticalsCertaintyUselessNot KnowingPrecisePrecisionArithmeticSceptic
Author:Bertrand Russell
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“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.”

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Author:Elizabeth West
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“Knapsack of the Metaphysicians.- Those who boast so mightily of the scientificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and in any event a whole tangled heap of 'wretched poor sinner' and Pharisee arrogance.”

IfsShouldLittlesEnoughPhilosophyWholeLightCertainAnswersPoorBehindsLordNiceEventsProductsSucceedDegreesDearOpeningImmortalityArroganceSinnerQuantityMetaphysicsBoastWretchedEmbarrassmentConcealedTangledPluckBundlesSpiritualismLord GodPharisees
Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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“I try to tell people to do, or advise them, anyway, is adopt conservative philosophies like hard work, preparation, perseverance, love of God, love of country, personal responsibility. Start to think for yourself and then go out and vote. And I think that once they start to do that, they will know where their vote should go.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsShouldTryingCountryHardPhilosophyResponsibilityHard WorkVotePerseveranceConservativePreparationGod LoveAdvisePersonal ResponsibilityThink For YourselfPerseverance In Love
Author:David A. Clarke, Jr
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“There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.”

MenShouldLongWarPhilosophyMightThreeSoundWealthPleasurePoorKnownPovertyKnowingConditionsLoversReflectionEmbraceDollarsCastsDeeperSurfaceListsThinkerQuartersRipMillionairePoor ManFlavourPleasures Of LifeVestsLove And War
Book:Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry (Illustrated)
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“Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.”

ShouldFirstsPhilosophyPlayLastsInterestingAirPoetDemandMachinesPhilosophicalFlyingAbsurdMediumsInstancePianoPoetry IsRequirementsTanksSewingForlornMethodical
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

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Author:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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“The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.”

ShouldMadeStatesPhilosophyFactsHappensWould BeExistenceIdealsPossessionAccidentsImprovementDevotedConservationPlatoRulingObligedBreakdownPhilosophicPlato SHappy Accidents
Author:John Dewey
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“If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him one.”

PeopleIfsKnowsMenShouldDifferentPhilosophyUseGovernmentEvilIndividualWhiteMillionsRightsStupidProgramMurderAssumingInternationalFavorsDamnGasRepublicGenocideAggressionSocialistInterfereNaziRestraintWhite ManFree MarketScopeChamberThumbsAtheisticAdvocatingIndividual RightsGas Chambers
Author:Jonah Goldberg
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“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.”

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Author:John Grier Hibben
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“Rather than being confined to a separate dimension, martial arts should be an extension of our way of living, of our philosophies, of the way we educate our children, of the job we devote so much of our time to, of the relationships we cultivate, and of the choices we make every day.”

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Book:On the Warrior's Path, Second Edition: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology
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“The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.”

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Book:The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1929
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“I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I'm doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world-the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life.”

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries.”

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Book:Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World
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“The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman. To most of us, the manipulative invoking of religion to advance a politician or a party is frightening and divisive. The American people will tolerate religious leaders taking positions for or against candidates.”

PeopleKnowsNeedsShouldMadePhilosophyPoliticalCoursesChurchReligiousPartyLeaderAtheismPositionPoliticianCandidatesFrighteningToleratePolitical ScienceChairmanCelestialManipulativeReligious LeadersChurch History
Author:Mario Cuomo
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“To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will, but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.”

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Author:Berenice Abbott
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“If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.”

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Book:An Essay on the Principle of Population: Illustrated
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“I want everyone to keep the property that he has acquired for himself according to the principle: benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual. But the state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners of property.”

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Author:Adolf Hitler
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“Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”

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Author:Ray Brassier
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“I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.”

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Book:Elizabeth I
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“What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use? May we not learn from hence, that black Clothes are not so fit to wear in a hot Sunny Climate or Season, as white ones; because in such Cloaths the Body is more heated by the Sun when we walk abroad, and are at the same time heated by the Exercise, which double Heat is apt to bring on putrid dangerous Fevers? The Soldiers and Seamen, who must march and labour in the Sun, should in the East or West Indies have an Uniform of white?”

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Book:The Complete Works, in Philosophy, Politics, and Morals, of the Late Dr. Benjamin Franklin: Now First Collected and Arranged: with Memoirs of His Early Life, Written by Himself ; in Three Volumes
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“Philosophy can add to our happiness in no other manner but by diminishing our misery; it should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of. Happy were we all born philosophers; all born with a talent of thus dissipating our own cares by spreading them upon all mankind.”

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Book:Enquiry into the present state of polite learning. The citizen of the world
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“I shall venture to affirm, that there never was a popular religion, which represented the state of departed souls in such a light,as would render it eligible for human kind, that there should be such a state. These fine models of religion are the mere product of philosophy. For as death lies between the eye and the prospect of futurity, that event is so shocking to nature, that it must throw a gloom on all the regions which lie beyond it; and suggest to the generality of mankind the idea of Cerberus and Furies; devils, and torrents of fire and brimstone.”

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Book:Dialogues and Natural History of Religion
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“Logical investigations can obviously be a useful tool for philosophy. They must, however, be informed by a sensitivity to the philosophical significance of the formalism and by a generous admixture of common sense, as well as a thorough understanding both of the basic concepts and of the technical details of the formal material used. It should not be supposed that the formalism can grind out philosophical results in a manner beyond the capacity of ordinary philosophical reasoning. There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.”

ShouldWellsPhilosophyUsedUnderstandingResultsCommonMaterialsOrdinaryConceptsCapacityToolsPhilosophicalDetailsCommon SenseMathematicalGenerousReasoningLogicalSignificanceSubstitutesInvestigationFormalSensitivityGrindThoroughThorough Understanding
Author:Saul Kripke
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“Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.”

ThinkingShouldArtEndsPhilosophyWholeFeelingsPoetryNaturalViewsCommonExamplePoetLimitsConsciousRelationPhilosophicalUnityMerePoint Of ViewBoundariesPerceiveRealmsLinksContrastOrganismsLiberal Education
Author:Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.”

IfsShouldArtPhilosophyHelpingGivenViewsSubjectsProduceConceptsAbsolutesPhilosophicalMoodLiberalismLogicalSomething NewPresumptionArt HistoryRigorScholarly
Author:Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“. . . the membership relation for sets can often be replaced by the composition operation for functions. This leads to an alternative foundation for Mathematics upon categories -- specifically, on the category of all functions. Now much of Mathematics is dynamic, in that it deals with morphisms of an object into another object of the same kind. Such morphisms (like functions) form categories, and so the approach via categories fits well with the objective of organizing and understanding Mathematics. That, in truth, should be the goal of a proper philosophy of Mathematics.”

ShouldWellsKindPhilosophyFormUnderstandingGoalDealsObjectsFitApproachFunctionRelationMathematicsFoundationObjectivesAlternativesOperationsCategoriesCompositionReplacedOften IsMembership
Author:Saunders Mac Lane
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