Philosopher Quotes

No one regards things before his feet But views with care the regions of the sky.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

The physician cannot prescribe by letter... he must feel the pulse.

Seneca the Younger

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.

Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

Arthur Schopenhauer

People do not understand what it costs in time and suffering to learn how to read. I have been working at it for eighty years, and I still can't say that I've succeeded.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.

Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but theyare without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.

Make a vessel of wax and put it in the sea, fastening its mouth in such a way as to prevent any water getting in. Then the water that percolates through the wax sides of the vessel is sweet, the earth stuff, the admixture of which makes the water salt, being separated off as it were by a filter.

Necessity is an evil; but there is no necessity for continuing to live subject to necessity.

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 was a Socratic style of life (which the Cynics were to imitate), and the Socratic dialogue was an exercise which brought Socrates' interlocutor to put himself in question, to take care of himself, and to make his soul as beautiful and wise as possible.

Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.

The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it.

Baltasar Gracián

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Alfred Korzybski

Such knowledge [of contemporary physicists] is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases: abstraction can provide us with knowledge of accidents but not necessary attributes as such. If we find that the search for essences can in fact only take the form of abstraction from individual cases then Aristotle's account of what counts as an explanation in physics is an unrealisable ideal.

Stephen Gaukroger

Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.

Jacques Maritain

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.

If chance be generally acknowledged to be the author of most discoveries in almost all the arts, and if in speculative sciences its power be less sensibly perceived, it is not perhaps less real...

Claude Adrien Helvétius

When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

Whatever fate may be in store for philosophy, her history can hardly fail to present a twofold interest ; for philosophical ideas are symptoms of the direction in which the spiritual development of the age is tending, and they are attempts to solve the great problems which have their root in the theoretical and practical relations in which man stands to the Universe of which he is a part.

Harald Høffding

Remote fountains are of little help to nearby fires.

Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.

The concept of 'tonality' signifies the unified relationship of chords to a central tonic and hence comprises two different assumptions: first, the existence of unifying factors, and second, the existence of, or at least the hypothetical ability to reconstruct, a tonal center.