Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The face is the soul of the body.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

Henry A. Kissinger

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

Hedy Lamarr

Compromise and tolerance are magic words. It took me 40 years to become philosophical.

Henry David Thoreau

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food

Henry David Thoreau

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Eric Hoffer

I could never figure out or probably did not take the trouble to figure out what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Giordano Bruno

Time takes all and gives all

J. M. Coetzee

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

H. L. Mencken

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

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.

Ray Bradbury

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Christopher Dawson

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

Greta Scacchi

I feel lucky, happy and philosophical about it all.

Henry David Thoreau

If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him.

Henry David Thoreau

Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.

Henry David Thoreau

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

Henry David Thoreau

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

Francois Rabelais

Pantagruelism is a certain gaitey of the spirit consisting in a disdain for the hazards of fortune.

Horace

There is moderation in everything.

Gottfried Leibniz

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

Gottfried Leibniz

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.