Famous Quotes & Sayings

Fernando Pessoa

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Ferdinand de Saussure

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

Francis Bacon

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Henri Bergson

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.

Henri Bergson

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

Henri Bergson

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

Henri Bergson

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment

Henri Bergson

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

Henri Bergson

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

Henri Bergson

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Henri Bergson

The motive power of democracy is love

Henri Frederic Amiel

Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults...

Henri Frederic Amiel

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

Henri Frederic Amiel

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists - in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

Helen Keller

I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical.

Evan Parker

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

Frank Zappa

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Fred Hoyle

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

Harold Bloom

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

Jay Leno

Rick Perry was philosophical about (his election losses). He said, 'Last week was Iowa. Yesterday was New Hampshire. ' He said at least it's giving him a chance to learn the names of all the states.

Moliere

No matter what everybody says, ultimately these things can harm us only by the way we react to them.

Julian Baggini

The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.

Julian Barnes

...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.

Iris Murdoch

Every artist is an unhappy lover.

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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is called the religion of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, section 108

Friedrich Nietzsche

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.