Famous Quotes & Sayings

Epictetus

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Epictetus

He is a drunkard who takes more than three glasses though he be not drunk.

Epictetus

Practice yourself, for heaven's sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

Epictetus

If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.

Epictetus

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

Epictetus

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

Epictetus

If you wish to be a writer, write.

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 Dewey

I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and cultureof their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.

Johann Georg Hamann

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Johan Huizinga

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

Joe Hill

It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

World history is a court of judgment.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable

John Burnside

Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.

Manuel Puig

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.