Famous Quotes & Sayings

Grantland Rice

Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 pecent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness and conversation.

Greg Bear

The price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.

Gordon Lightfoot

Will you gather daydreams or will you gather wealth? How can you find your fortune when you cannot find yourself?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

John Dryden

Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet.

John Dryden

Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated.

Louis Pasteur

In good philosophy, the word cause ought to be reserved to the single Divine impulse that has formed the universe.

Louis Pasteur

Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.

John Churton Collins

Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.

John Cheever

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

John Bolton

Maybe it's my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard.

John Bolton

My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all.

John Archibald Wheeler

I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times

Matthew Arnold

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

Matthew Arnold

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Meg Cabot

But I intend to enjoy the weeks I have left with you to the fullest. Because I know from my study of the philosophy of time, whatever is going to happen in the future is already unavoidable.

Maxine Hong Kingston

There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.

Maxim Gorky

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

Maxim Gorky

The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.

Max Stirner

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!

Max Black

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

Max Born

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

Max Born

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.