Famous Quotes & Sayings

Iris Murdoch

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

Iris Murdoch

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Imre Lakatos

The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.

Imre Lakatos

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

I. F. Stone

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

Gloria Vanderbilt

Why not me? Suffering, she understood, is, in fact, random, universal.

Giordano Bruno

The gems of philosophy are not less precious because they are not understood.

Giordano Bruno

I need not instruct you of my belief: Time gives all and takes all away ; everything changes but nothing perishes ; One only is immutable, eternal and ever endures, one and the same with itself. With this philosophy my spirit grows, my mind expands. Whereof, how r ever obscure the night may be, I await daybreak, and they who dwell in day look for night Rejoice therefore, and keep whole, if you can, and return love for love.

Giorgio Armani

Remain true to yourself and your philosophy.

My philosophy is that the club is more important than anyone!

J. L. Austin

There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.

J. L. Austin

The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.

J. Michael Straczynski

My philosophy: find what it is you want to say, walk in the room, say it, and get the hell out.

J. M. Coetzee

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

J. M. Coetzee

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

J. M. Coetzee

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

J. K. Rowling

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

H. G. Wells

There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.

H. L. Mencken

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

H. L. Mencken

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

Guglielmo Marconi

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

Grace Jones

I thought I'd take style to its limit... My philosophy is a belief in magic, good luck , self-confidence, and pride.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

Martin Heidegger

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors

Martin Heidegger

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.

Martin Heidegger

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

Martin Heidegger

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S., but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

Martin Heidegger

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Marquis de Sade

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

Marquis de Sade

The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.