Famous Quotes & Sayings

Van Morrison

Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds that I may be a vehicle for thee.

Trofim Lysenko

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

William Graham Sumner

We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.

William H. Gass

I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

William Godwin

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

William Golding

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

Wilfred Owen

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

Waylon Jennings

If I could only fly, you see, a lot of my problems would be gone. When you think of just how much I'd save on shoes alone.

Waylon Jennings

I'm just a man, no more or no less. Bad as the worst, good as the best.

Stefan Zweig

With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor.

Stefan Zweig

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

Sonia Sotomayor

My judicial philosophy is fidelity to the law.

Sonia Sotomayor

I'm a common law judge. I believe in deciding every case on its facts, not on a legal philosophy. And I believe in deciding each case in the most limited way possible, because common law judges have a firm belief that the best development of the law is the one that lets society show you the next step, and that next step is in the new facts that each case presents.

Sophie Kinsella

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Thomas B. Macaulay

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

Thomas Hobbes

He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.

Thomas Hobbes

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

Thomas Hobbes

The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.

Thomas Hobbes

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Thomas Hobbes

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

Tim Cook

I think that [there is] this fundamental right to privacy and the philosophy that government shouldn't be intrusive.

Tim Berners-Lee

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Thomas Kuhn

What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it.

Thomas Kuhn

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

Thomas Jefferson

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.

Thomas Frank

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.

Victor Cousin

What is philosophy? It is something that lightens up, that makes bright.

Victor Cousin

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.

Victor Hugo

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

Victor Hugo

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.

Victor Hugo

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

Victor Hugo

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.