Philosopher Quotes
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Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.
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How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy.
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Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
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Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.
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A philospher sees the Earth as a large planet, travelling through the heavens, covered with fools.
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A philosopher will not believe what he sees because he is too busy speculating about what he does not see.
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I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.
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An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it so seriously.
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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.
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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.
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The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.
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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.
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Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.
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The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.
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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.
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If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.
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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.
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The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward.
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We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.
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Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato’s allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.
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The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.
