Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist, Section 7

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153

Friedrich Nietzsche

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.

Friedrich Nietzsche

So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.

Jean Henri Fabre

Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful. Let those who do not, seek their own kind.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.