Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.

David Mitchell

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

Carl Sagan

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity

Bryce Dallas Howard

The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.

Camille Paglia

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.

William Shakespeare

A great cause of the night is lack of the sun.

David Hume

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

David Hume

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

David Hume

No advantages in this world are pure and unmixed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Falsehood, like a drawing in perspective, will not bear to be examined in every point of view, because it is a good imitation of truth, as a perspective is of the reality, only in one. But truth, like that reality of which the perspective is the representation, will bear to be scrutinized in all points of view, and though examined under every situation, is one and the same.

Alan Watts

Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.

Alan Watts

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Alan Watts

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Alan Watts

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Alan Watts

Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality...

Alan Watts

I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag , whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people , and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

Alan Watts

Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.

Alan Watts

The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.

Charles Dickens

Try to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than you should.

Charles Spurgeon

Dear friends, whenever you want to understand a text of Scripture, try to read the original

Charles Spurgeon

The great reason why we have so little good preaching is that we have so little piety. To be eloquent one must be in earnest; he must not only act as if he were in earnest, or try to be in earnest, but be in earnest.

Alan Watts

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

Alan Watts

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Alan Watts

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Alan Parsons

That Beatle euphoria has always been there, and it's hard to be in a room with a Beatle and try to be totally natural. You never shake that off.

Alan Moore

I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.

Alan Arkin

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.