Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tina Fey

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

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.

Tom Robbins

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

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.

Stanislaw Lem

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

Stanislaw Lem

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.

Serj Tankian

In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle.

Steven Pinker

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels... Our minds evolved... to solve problems, [not]... to answer any question we are capable of asking.

Susan Howatch

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

Steven Weinberg

How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data.

Tariq Ramadan

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge.

T. S. Eliot

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

Jostein Gaarder

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.

Jostein Gaarder

Let me put it more precisely: The ability to give birth is a natural characteristic. In the same way, everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.

Kenneth Branagh

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.

Radhanath Swami

Man cannot be enlightened through any organization, creed, dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through understanding the contents of his own mind, through observation, not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.

Stephen Jay Gould

If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated and must not be condemned by genetic speculation.

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.

Rick Riordan

Grover didn't say anything for awhile. Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your apple?

God is nearer to me than I am to myself; He is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

The now wherein God made the world is as near this time as the now I am speaking in this moment, and the last day is as near this now as was yesterday.

People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Think I'll flip a coin, I'm a winner either way Mmmmmm, I feel lucky today

Martin Buber

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

Martin Buber

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

Philip Reeve

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.

Peter Medawar

The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.

Peter Adamson

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

Peter Singer

Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering on them.

Primo Levi

I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.