Philosophers Quotes
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The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.
Plato
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Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology.
Allen W. Wood
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There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.
Michel Foucault
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Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods.
Baruch Spinoza
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The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
Jostein Gaarder
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Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Cesare Pavese
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Pagan philosophers set up reason as the sole guide of life, of wisdom and conduct; but Christian philosophy demands of us that we surrender our reason to the Holy Spirit; and this means that we no longer live for ourselves, but that Christ lives and reigns within us (Rom 12:1; Eph 4:23; Gal 2:20).
John Calvin
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It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
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These questions that philosophers confront have to be reconfronted in every generation. The problems of philosophy reoccur in different forms.
Alvin Plantinga
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How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many
proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many
magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the
Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their
deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their
own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then
ever before from applause.
Tertullian
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...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner
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Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The notion that obedience dehumanizes those who render it is a popular cry of the philosophers of radical individualism, such as Thoreau, who are so important to America's myth of itself.
Elizabeth Samet
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These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one’s listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred.
Edward Feser
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No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
Moliere
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Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.
Bart Ehrman