PHILOSOPHY QUOTES II
quotations about philosophy
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, New Statesman, October 8, 2013
Among all the characters of mankind, that of the Philosopher is the most perfect. Distinguished from those of the inferior kind, by clearer and more distinct perceptions; by more comprehensive views of both nature and art; by a more ardent love and higher admiration of what is excellent; by a firmer attachment to virtue, and the general good of the world; by a lower regard for all inferior beauties compared with the supreme, consisting in rectitude of conduct and dignitude of behaviour; by a greater moderation in prosperity, and greater patience and courage under the evils of life; the real Philosopher, though not absolutely perfect, sets the grandeur of human genius in the fairest light.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES
Some Problems of Philosophy
Civilizations ultimately run on ideas, and societies that want to prosper should, so to speak, work out them out, manipulating their intellectual muscles regularly.
PASCAL-EMMANUEL GOBRY
"France's strange, wonderful love affair with philosophy", The Week, April 18, 2016
Nor may a philosopher, any more than a poet, be a mere link in a chain: he must be a staple firmly and deeply fixt in the adamantine walls of Truth. If he rightly deserves the name, his mind must be impregnated with some of the primordial ideas, of life and being, man and nature, fate and freedom, order and law, thought and will, power and God. He may have received them from others; but he must receive them as seeds: they must teem and germinate within him, and mingle with the essence of his spirit, and must shape themselves into a new original growth. He who merely takes a string of propositions from former writers, and busies himself in drawing fresh inferences from them, may be a skilful logician or psychologer, but has no claim to the high title of a philosopher.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Divine philosophy weeds from our breast by degrees full many a vice and every kind of error; she is the first to teach us what is right.
JUVENAL
attributed, Great Thoughts from Classic Authors
Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
It is unfortunately very difficult to describe the nature of philosophy in a small compass; the only satisfaction that an author can draw from the attempt to do so lies in the knowledge that an answer to the question "What is philosophy?" is apt to seem persuasive only to the extent that it is brief. The more one ponders over the qualifications that any reasoned answer must contain, the more one is driven to the conclusion that this question is itself one of the principal subjects of philosophical thinking.
ROGER SCRUTON
Short History of Modern Philosophy
For Hume, skepticism about metaphysical subjects ended in an indolence born of seclusion. The only solution was to transfer the skeptical impulse in philosophy from the solitude of the study to the wider social world. Under these circumstances, skepticism fostered equanimity rather than discontent. In society, the true skeptic acknowledged the value of common sense without submitting slavishly to its whims. Skepticism in this context was profitable and enabling; it criticized without destroying the conditions of criticism, which depended on the existence of society and government. The positive results of criticism could be seen in society, politics, and morals. Philosophy could expose damaging ideas in ethics, unsocial attitudes in religion, and dangerous postures in politics.
RICHARD BOURKE
"Hume's Call to Action", The Nation, April 20, 2016
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook C", Aphorisms
Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?" -- A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised, careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
A mind rightly instituted in the school of philosophy, acquires at once the stability of the oak and the flexibility of the osier.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Citizen of the World
The sole function of philosophy is to lead us to happiness by way of the shortest possible route.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
attributed, Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy
The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypothesis, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like questions.
ISAAC NEWTON
A Treatise on Physics
The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society.
HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON
Memoire sur la science de l'homme
A true philosopher is married to wisdom; he needs no other bride.
PROCLUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Philosophy should quicken life, not deaden it.
SUSAN GLASPELL
Little Masks