20th-century Philosopher Quotes

Life is a mirror that reflects what one thinks and does or what his own thoughts make him do.

Carlos Bernardo González Pecotche

Deconstruction is not meant to be a soft sighing for the future, but a way of deciding now and being impassioned in a moment.

The failure to take organization seriously is perhaps but another consequence of the rapid development of physics and chemistry as compared to other sciences, and the consequent dazzling effect this had on biological vision.

Joseph Henry Woodger

Like paths and alleys overgrown with hardy, rank-growing weeds, the words we use are overgrown with our individual, private, provincial associations, which tend to choke the meaning.

Stefan Themerson

For the institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from exisiting national parliaments.

Larry Siedentop

Necessary, since every moment in our lives is marked by death, like a shadow from another realm, it appear to us like a vanishing point for everything. How can one meditate on live without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?

André Comte-Sponville

To kill or not to kill, that was the question that haunted me.

Torbjörn Tännsjö

Perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would be no algebra.

The interpretation of thought as ""inner speech" has taken different forms, and has been used to clarify a variety of problems--thus problems pertaining to the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things.

Wilfrid Sellars

It could plausibly be argued that far from Christian theology having hampered the study of nature for fifteen hundred years, it was Greek corruptions of biblical Christianity which hampered it.

Performance for another in no way signals the inferiority of the performer to the one for whom the performance is intended.

That which is injurious loses its capacity to harm when it is brought into the light, and we attract to us that which we emanate.

David Hawkins (philosopher)

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true.

Bas van Fraassen

Why in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident?

The overwhelming presence of machines and instrumentation must be one of the most salient features of the modern scientific laboratory.... The development of science depends at least as much on new machinery as it does on new ideas.

It is undeniable that every human being is entitled to living space, daily bread, and the protection of the law as a common birthright; these are fundamentals and should not be handed out as an act of charity.

In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason.

Lewis White Beck

If we do take statements to be the primary bearers of truth, there seems to be a very simple answer to the question, what is it for them to be true: for a statement to be true is for things to be as they are stated to be.

Historians of ideas soon learn — to their dismay — that their subject appears to be mathematically dense: between any two people who wrote on the matter there appears to be another.

A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience.... A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science.

Francisco J. Ayala

There can hardly be a sharper contrast than that between the everlasting atoms of classical physics and the vanishing "particles" of modern physics.

An anomaly is not an abnormality. Diversity does not signify sickness.

Georges Canguilhem

The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.

The distinction between pure and empirical astronomy is like the distinction between pure and empirical geometry. Pure geometry is a priori; It is independent of empirical data. Empirical Geometry is a posteriori; it is based on empirical data.