Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henri Frederic Amiel

Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults...

Henri Frederic Amiel

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

Henri Frederic Amiel

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists - in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Philosophy starts with doubt and loves only truth.

Helen Keller

If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.

Helen Keller

The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy.

Helen Keller

I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical.

Helen Keller

I take happiness very seriously. It is a creed, a philosophy and an objective.

Cat Stevens

Life is a maze of doors and they all open from the side you're on. Just keep on pushing hard boy, try as you may, you're going to wind up where you started from.

George Eliot

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

George Eliot

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

They have their system and their philosophy, and they're willing to stick by it,

All Phil is trying to do is set the record straight.

James E. Faust

Another false philosophy that appeals to the Mr. Hyde side of our natures is that peeking into pornography is harmless. This is a terrible deception. Pornography is as addictive as cocaine or any illegal drug.

Janeane Garofalo

I would say that, unfortunately, the word liberal has been redefined over the last 30 years as if it is a bad thing. But liberalism is a great American philosophy. Being a liberal is one of the best things you can be. I don't think they get a fair shake at all in the conservative mainstream media. So maybe there's some intimidation there.

Janet Evanovich

Ranger declined the butterscotch pudding, not wanting to disrupt the consistency of his blood sugar level. I had two puddings and coffee, choosing to keep my pancreas at peak performance. Use it or lose it is my philosophy.

Ernie Banks

It's a kind of philosophy of my own life, to create the energy enough to keep on going.

Ernest Bramah

The province of philosophy is not so much to prevent calamities befalling as to demonstrate that they are blessings when they have taken place.

Ernest Dimnet

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

Evan Parker

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

Evan Parker

You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.

Christopher Hitchens

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Mindy Grossman

I've always had a philosophy that position doesn't define power. Impact defines power. What impact are you making on people? What impact are you making on business?

Mindy Cohn

So that's my philosophy: If you believe in yourself, the chances and the opportunities will come around.

Kumail Nanjiani

Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.

Hank Stram

My philosophy? Simplicity plus variety.

Frank Zappa

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Fred Hoyle

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Fred Hoyle

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

Frank Herbert

We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.

Frank Herbert

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

George Henry Lewes

The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

Harold Bloom

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.