Famous Quotes & Sayings

Primo Levi

I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.

Plutarch

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax

Plutarch

Note that the eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse and gross by reason of satiety and surfeit.

Plutarch

Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen.

Pierre Bayle

Philosophy can be compared to some powders that are so corrosive that, after they have eaten away the infected flesh of a wound, they then devour the living flesh, rot the bones, and penetrate to the very marrow. Philosophy at first refutes errors. But if it is not stopped at this point, it goes on to attack truths. And when it is left on its own, it goes so far that it no longer knows where it is and can find no stopping place.

Phillip E. Johnson

This [the intelligent design movement] isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science, it's about religion and philosophy.

Phillip E. Johnson

All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so.

Phillip E. Johnson

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

Phillip E. Johnson

Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy.

Phillip E. Johnson

To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.

Phillip E. Johnson

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

Naveen Jain

True philanthropy requires a disruptive mindset, innovative thinking and a philosophy driven by entrepreneurial insights and creative opportunities.

Nathaniel Branden

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Mother Teresa

Justice without love is not justice. Love without justice is not love

Victor Hugo

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

Victor Hugo

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

Victor Hugo

Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.

Robert Fripp

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

Robert Fulghum

Infinite possibility in all things is a certainty. That pretty much covers theology and philosophy for me.

Robert Bork

[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.

Rene Daumal

Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.

Renee Fleming

My philosophy is that the people around us are there doing as much work if not more work behind the scenes and they're the last people you would ever be unkind to, so I hope I'm not a diva off stage.

Rene Descartes

Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.

Rene Descartes

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

Rene Descartes

Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Rene Descartes

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Rene Descartes

Science is practical philosophy.

Rene Descartes

I have concluded the evident existence of God, and that my existence depends entirely on God in all the moments of my life, that I do not think that the human spirit may know anything with greater evidence and certitude.

Rene Descartes

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

Rene Descartes

De omnibus dubitandum

Thucydides

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

Thomas Paine

It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences, and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles: he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

Thomas Paine

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools, in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only, has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of his existence. They labour with studied ingenuity to ascribe every thing they behold to innate properties of matter, and jump over all the rest by saying, that matter is eternal.