Philosophers Quotes
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Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
Thomas Carlyle
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Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.'
Immanuel Kant
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The technology [semiconductors] which has transformed practical existence is largely an application of what was discovered by these allegedly irresponsible [natural] philosophers.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
Anne Carson
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There will be no end to the troubles of states,Or of humanity itself,Till philosophers become kings in this world,Or till those we now call kings and rulers really And truly become philosophers.
Plato
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It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.
Aristotle
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He (E.A.Poe) cannot be blamed for not saying clearly what beauty is. The greatest philosophers in the world acknowledge in the end that the best one can do is to recognize it when it is there.
Etienne Gilson
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But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better.
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac
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When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.
Bill Mollison
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Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.
Elliott Sober
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When one seriously comes to understand the classical philosophical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas – and not merely the potted caricatures of it that even many professional philosophers, to their shame, tend to rely on – one learns just how contingent and open to question are the various modern, and typically “naturalistic,” philosophical assumptions that most contemporary thinkers and certainly most secularists simply take for granted without rational argument.
Edward Feser
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A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Upon appointment as the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Berlin, formed for the advancement of science.
Adolf von Harnack
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The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal.
Martin Luther
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Philosophers need not much use the word 'intuition' or the concept of intuition, except when they happen to be working on the epistemology of the a priori.
Ernest Sosa
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Philosophers do need to have intuitions of various specific sorts: ethical, metaphysical, etc., depending on their targeted subject matter. And they must make intuition reports, as they record the contents of their intuitions. But they need not go into whether an intuition has been enjoyed.
Ernest Sosa
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I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.
Eugene McCarthy
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Philosophers often think all scientists must be scientific realists. If you ask a simple question like "Are electrons real?" the answer will be "Yes". But if your questions are less superficial, for example whether some well-known scientist was a good scientist. Then, they had insisted that only empirical criteria matter and that they actually did not believe in the reality of sub-atomic entities. Ask "If that turned out to be true, would you still say they were good scientists?" The answer would reveal something about how they themselves understood what it is to be a scientist.
Bastiaan van Fraassen
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We embrace the idea -- advanced by both ancient philosophers and modern physicists -- that the world is one. Everything connects to everything; therefore, as we change, the world cannot but change with us.
Marianne Williamson
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If we let ourselves believe that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ, then we shall find peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
Blaise Pascal
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The surface of the Moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it to be, but is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the Earth, relieved by chains of mountains and deep valleys.
Galileo Galilei
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The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe