Famous Quotes & Sayings

J. L. Austin

The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.

J. Michael Straczynski

My philosophy: find what it is you want to say, walk in the room, say it, and get the hell out.

J. M. Coetzee

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

J. M. Coetzee

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

J. M. Coetzee

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

J. M. Coetzee

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

J. K. Rowling

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

H. G. Wells

There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.

H. L. Mencken

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

H. L. Mencken

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

H. L. Mencken

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

H. L. Mencken

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

H. L. Mencken

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

H. L. Mencken

The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.

Guglielmo Marconi

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

Grace Jones

I thought I'd take style to its limit... My philosophy is a belief in magic, good luck , self-confidence, and pride.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

George Herbert

The Philosophy of Princes is to dive into the Secrets of men, leaving the secrets of nature to those that have spare time.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is called the religion of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, section 108