Famous Quotes & Sayings

Plato

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

Plato

The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies... they are the trees and the plants and the seeds.

Plato

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Plato

To be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

Plato

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Plato

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Plato

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.

Philip Roth

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

Mason Cooley

Modern thought does not offer consolations, but upsets.

Ted Cruz

If we look at it more from a philosophical standpoint, these foundations of atheism and secular humanism believe that you are your own God. That leads us to something that unfortunately has crept into many churches across America, and it is what I call the Social Gospel. The social gospel, that could creep into something that is called Liberation Theology, which is a mixture of leftist, pseudo-Christianity with Marxism.

Theodore Sturgeon

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Marcel Proust

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

John Stuart Mill

The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. ... A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement.

John Stuart Mill

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality

John Stuart Mill

The doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual's mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred: that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event.

James Jeans

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.

James Joyce

The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.

James Richardson

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

James Russell Lowell

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

Friedrich Engels

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Friedrich Engels

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Friedrich Engels

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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.

Johannes Kepler

I also ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.

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

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.