Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

Lorrie Moore

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Michael Crichton

Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

Michael Crichton

The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.

Mary Ritter Beard

Unless one's philosophy is all-inclusive, nothing can be understood.

Mary Ritter Beard

Every great creative idea, formulated as a philosophy, has a social setting - in time, in a geographical location, in a political economy, in a matrix of interests and knowledge. It is not a free-swinging phenomenon like a balloon without moorings. It is not produced in a vacuum and, being creative, it does not work in a vacuum. Nurtured on things experienced and things known, it reaches out toward the unknown like a flower on a stalk growing out of the soil.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

There is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!

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.

Marquis de Sade

Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.

Mark Messier

Coaching really is an individual philosophy.

Mark Messier

You always really have to remain consistent in your beliefs and philosophy.

Nick Offerman

I became very interested [in philosophy] after attending the U.N. Conference on sustainable development in Brazil.I'm very concerned about climate change and the world reaching a tipping point. And, I see other people who really just want to survive to make it to the next election, rather than making means of change.

Marvin Bower

Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.

Patti Smith

Words are just rules and regulations to me.

Patti Smith

These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.

Patti Smith

I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

Ozzy Osbourne

Be good and honest to your fellow man and try to do something good for somebody - thet's my philosophy.

Masanobu Fukuoka

I wonder how it is that people's philosophies have come to spin faster than the changing seasons.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on.

Martha Graham

America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.

Martha Beck

I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.

Maria Schell

I have come finally to a simple philosophy of work. I enjoy what I do and do the best I can. That is enough.

Marguerite Young

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Paul Samuelson

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

Paul Ryan

Every now and then, President Obama sorta drops his veil. He's less coy about his philosophy, he sort of reveals his true governing philosophy, what he really believes.

Michel de Montaigne

Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.

Michel de Montaigne

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.