Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.

Richard P. Feynman

People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.

Richard Dawkins

Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.

Richard Dawkins

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

Saint Augustine

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.

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

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

Rene Descartes

De omnibus dubitandum

Thomas Huxley

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

Robert McKee

Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both.

Robert Anton Wilson

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

Steve Nash

You have good games, you have bad games. You have good years, you have bad years. I have always been kind of philosophical about that.

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.

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 Hobbes

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

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 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

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 Frank

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

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

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

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.

Roger Ebert

Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.

Sarah Miles

Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical “proof.” It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.

Robert Graves

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

Rudy Giuliani

I do think you have sort of a general philosophical approach that you want from a justice, and I think a strict constructionist would be probably the way I'd describe it.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Tom Robbins

I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

Tom Robbins

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.