Famous Quotes & Sayings

Epictetus

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

Epictetus

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

Hermann von Helmholtz

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.

Hilary Putnam

...while there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics....

Heraclitus

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

Orhan Pamuk

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

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.

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.

John Irving

Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student - and not a good one - and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.

John Searle

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples

Moses Mendelssohn

You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes

Slavoj Zizek

For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

Rajneesh

If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible - only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.

Rajneesh

My love is unconditional. Your action is irrelevant.

Socrates

An unexamined life is a life of no account.

Socrates

I only know one thing, and that is I know nothing

Socrates

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

Socrates

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Socrates

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

The only thing I know is that I know nothing

Socrates

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Socrates

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

Michelle Shocked

Their lives ran in circles so small They thought they'd seen it all

Michael Servetus

In the Bible, there is no mention of the Trinity. . . . We get to know God, not through our proud philosophical concepts, but through Christ.

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.

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.

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