Famous Quotes & Sayings

Aristotle

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Aristotle

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

Edward Zwick

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

Clarice Lispector

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

Elizabeth Janeway

Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.

Elias Canetti

Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.

Bruce Schneier

Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security

Jane Smiley

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

C. S. Lewis

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

Charles Baudelaire

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Charles Simic

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

Bill McKibben

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.

Baruch Spinoza

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Baruch Spinoza

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Baruch Spinoza

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

Baruch Spinoza

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

Baruch Spinoza

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Baruch Spinoza

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

Baruch Spinoza

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

Baruch Spinoza

I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature

Baruch Spinoza

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

Baruch Spinoza

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.

Baruch Spinoza

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Baruch Spinoza

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Camille Paglia

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.

Carl Jung

I hold the view that the alchemist’s hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious. As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change.

Carl Jung

I know that previously I would not have dared to express myself so explicitly about so uncertain a matter. I can take this risk because I am now in my eighth decade, and the changing opinions of men scarcely impress me any more; the thoughts of the old masters are of greater value to me than the philosophical prejudices of the Western mind.

Carl Jung

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.

Aldo Leopold

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

Albert Einstein

Now to the term 'relativity theory.' I admit that it is unfortunate, and has given occasion to philosophical misunderstandings.

Abraham Lincoln

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.