English Philosopher Quotes

John Locke

Francis Bacon

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas More

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Herbert Spencer

William Penn

As, in Sense, that which is really within us, is (as I have said before) only Motion, caused by the action of external objects, but in appearance; to the Sight, Light and Color; to the Ear, Sound; to the Nostril, Odor, &c.

There is no doubt but men of genius and leisure may carry our method to greater perfection, but, having had long experience, we have found none equal to it for the commodiousness it affords in working with the Understanding.

As to a perfect s cience of natural bodies... we are, I think, so far from being capable of any such thing, that I conclude it lost labor to seek after it.

The time has gone by when the intelligent public needs to be reminded of the practical utility of science, or of the fact that the investigation of any problem, however apparently remote from everyday life, may be fraught with the most valuable consequences.

Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words.... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies."

John of Salisbury

The peaks of science may appear to be floating in the clouds, but their foundations are in the hard facts of experience.

R. B. Braithwaite

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.

We have a right to know or may lawfully know any truth. And a right to know any truth whatsoever implies a right to think freely.

Anthony Collins

About C. S. Lewis:

Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.

No doubt, a scientist isn't necessarily penalized for being a complex, versatile, eccentric individual with lots of extra-scientific interests. But it certainly doesn't help him a bit.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Things are sullen, and will be as they are, whatever we think them or wish them to be.

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

Alfred Jules Ayer

The Senses place before us the Characters of the Book of Nature; but these convey no knowledge to us, till we have discovered the Alphabet by which they are to be read.

William Whewell

A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to hunger and thirst after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes.

If we start with the assumption, grounded on experience, that there is uniformity in this average, and so long as this is secured to us, we can afford to be perfectly indifferent to the fate, as regards causation, of the individuals which compose the average.

A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question, what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism, and spends his energies upon that

As Roland Barthes said, those who do not re-read condemn themselves to reading the same story everywhere: "they recognize what they already think and know."

Bernard Williams

And peradventure we have more cause to thank Him for our loss than for our winning; for His wisdom better seeth what is good for us than we do ourselves.

This part of optics, when well understood, shows us how we may make things a very long distance off appear as if placed very close, and large near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a distance appear any size we want, so that it may be possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distances, or to count sand, or seed, or any sort of minute objects.

Robert Grosseteste

Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

Herbert Spencer

The ordinary ministry is that which receives all of its direction from the will of God revealed in the Scriptures and from those means which God has appointed in the church for its continual edification.

Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered as bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other.

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun in the proportion of five hundred to one, and by supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its [mass] with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity.

The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.

William Hazlitt

When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that someone broke them.