Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Natalie Babbitt

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

Nancy Pearcey

Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone - not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us.

Nancy Pearcey

A worldview is not the same things a formal philosophy, otherwise it would only be for philosophers. Even ordinary people have a set of convictions about how reality functions and how they should live. Some convictions are conscious while others are unconscious but together they form a consistent picture of reality.

Nancy Pearcey

Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth.

Nancy Pearcey

An idol is not necessarily something concrete, like a golden calf. It can also be something abstract, like matter. Is matter part of the created order? Sure it is. So the philosophy of materialism qualifies as an idol in the biblical sense.

Nancy Pearcey

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

Murray Kempton

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

Ken Wilber

..I sought a world philosophy-or an integral philosophy-that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details-that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a plausible Theory of Everything.

Ken Wilber

What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth — or in heaven — do I mean by integral? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness. Short definition, tall order.

Ken Wilber

The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones.

Ken Wilber

What's my philosophy? In a word, integral.

Ken Wilber

The integral approach is committed to the full spectrum of consciousness as it manifests in all its extraordinary diversity. This allows the integral approach to recognize and honor the Great Holarchy of Being first elucidated by the perennial philosophy and the great wisdom traditions in general... The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.

Kathryn Schulz

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Katherine Mansfield

If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.

Julian Baggini

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

Julian Baggini

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

Julian Baggini

The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.

Julian Baggini

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

Julian Assange

A great number of those working for liberal causes are not only shy but borderline collusive. They want change to happen nicely, and it won't. They want decency to come about without anybody suffering or being embarrassed, and it won't. And most of all they want to give many of the enemies of open government the benefit of the doubt, and I don't. It's not just a difference of approach, it's a complete schism in our respective philosophy. You can't go about disclosure in the hope that it won't spoil anybody's dinner.

Kevin O'Leary

I do not own a single security anywhere that doesn't pay a dividend, and I formed a mutual-fund company with that very simple philosophy.

Kerry King

I don't really have a life philosophy; my thing is just rebelling against pretty much organized religion. That is my main thing, because personally I think it's a crutch for people that are too weak to get through life on their own. I'm the kind of guy that says if I don't see it, then it doesn't work. And nobody can show me God.

Ken Burns

Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.

Ken Follett

The boundary between philosophy and fiction is not as clear cut as you may think and the two definitely interact..

Keanu Reeves

I don't know if that's philosophy or if that's something else, but to me it [digital filming] has an emotional feeling , that this materiality, the loss of the materiality.

Ray Bradbury

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

Ray Bradbury

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Ray Bradbury

The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves.

Ralph Adams Cram

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter.