Famous Quotes & Sayings

David O. Russell

When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.

Daniel Barenboim

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

Cyrano de Bergerac

In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.

David Harvey

There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?

Confucius

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Daniel Tammet

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

David Bohm

From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character...

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.

William Shakespeare

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

William Shakespeare

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano!

Francis Bacon

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

Harry Belafonte

Poverty continues to exist. Its appearance seems to be relentless in evidencing itself not only to all the things we experience here in America, but certainly what we see globally. And I don't see anywhere any philosophical analysis that suggests we know how to get out of this.

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.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.

Herbert Read

The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.

Eugene Ionesco

When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out...

Eugene Ionesco

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

Eugene Ionesco

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

Isaac Newton

What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

Irving Kristol

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Can an ass be tragic?--To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.