Philosopher Quotes
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It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.
Nick Harkaway -
Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
Joshua Foer
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My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application-not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech-and learn them so well that words become works.
Seneca the Younger -
I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about life, most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.
Ray Bradbury -
The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.
Morris Raphael Cohen -
I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.
Erskine Caldwell -
Philosophers have long conceded, however, that every man has two educators: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.
Carter G. Woodson -
To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
Thomas Kuhn
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I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.
Nicolaus Copernicus -
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
Terry Eagleton -
Maybe...in a way, this coffee reminds me of something. Maybe...maybe only a philosopher or a mad man would make this connection, but it's a little like life. I mean it's powerful going down and that doesn't even take into account the aftertaste, which really takes getting used to.
Bette Greene -
An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it so seriously.
Bernie Glassman -
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John Gardner -
I've always argued that it is just as desirable, just as possible, to have philosopher plumbers as philosopher kings.
Edith Green
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Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.
Hu Shih -
Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. To which Quine is said to have responded: Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.
Chet Raymo -
The philosopher is Nature's pilot.
George Bernard Shaw -
Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
George Bernard Shaw -
The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky -
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
Thomas Kuhn
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A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place.
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle -
Because the Western civilization is dominated by dualistic thinking, holistic scientists and philosophers don't get the recognition they deserve.
Satish Kumar -
The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth.... He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one ... Then how can he who has the magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all times and all existence, think much of human life He cannot. Or can such a one account death fearful No indeed.
Plato -
No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
Herbert Spencer