Famous Quotes & Sayings

Philosophy is a proud, sullen detector of the poverty and misery of man. It may turn him from the world with a proud, sturdy contempt; but it cannot come forward and say, here are rest, grace, pardon, peace, strength, and consolation.

Robert Bringhurst

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

Tom Shadyac

Look at native cultures - they've lasted for tens of thousands of years, not doing everything right. We wouldn't want to emulate them in many ways, but their basic philosophies - being a part of nature, a part of a tribe or group without elevating, not what you call dominator philosophies - they lasted for tens of thousands of years. It took us to come and put them asunder.

Tom Shadyac

I am operating under the philosophy that I will simply use what I need and the rest - even if I still have it somewhere - is not mine. It is others'. It is for the healing of the natural world. And it is in the process of returning.

Tom Hodgkinson

There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.

Tom Hodgkinson

The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.

Tom T. Hall

Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

Tom Stoppard

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

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.

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

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.

Thomas Paine

It is a faculty of the human mind to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.