Philosopher Quotes

That which makes you want more money is the same as that which makes the plant grow; it is life seeking fuller expression.

Wallace Wattles

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.

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

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

Carlos Bernardo González Pecotche

The deep satisfaction found in scientific work, akin to the delight derived from genuine art, is one of the fundamental human emotions which is highly intensified by personal contact with the creative mind.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider

All knowledge, we admit, is in the last resort "empirical," in the sense that it arises out of facts, that is, out of experiences which we cannot altogether fashion as we please to suit our own convenience, or our own sense of what is fitting or desirable, but have largely to accept as they come to us.

Alfred Edward Taylor

O my boy! thou hast been to me like a man who took a stone, and threw it up to heaven to stone his Lord with it. And the stone did not hit, and did not reach high enough, but it became the cause of guilt and sin.
O my boy! if thou hadst honoured me and respected me and hadst listened to my words thou wouldst have been my heir and wouldst have reigned over my dominions.
O my son! know thou that if the tail of the dog or the pig were ten cubits long it would not approach to the worth of the horse's even if it were like silk.
O my boy! I thought that thou wouldst have been my heir at my death; and thou through thy envy and thy insolence didst desire to kill me. But the Lord delivered me from thy cunning.

There cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, nor without this qualification. For there are some who make this (i. e. a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another — air is cold, water moist, and fire hot—and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise.

Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.

Morality cannot be based on religion. If anything, the opposite is partly true, for nothing can be God unless he or it is an object worthy of worship and it is our own moral insight that must tell us if anything at all could possibly be
worthy of worship.

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

Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.

In the practice of any craft, we are less concerned with the quantity of the product than with its quality, and less concerned with the product than with the artisan.

Lanza del Vasto

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons.

Alain de Benoist

What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?

When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.

Jacob Needleman

Being happy is a great science. If you are not happy, do not be confused. Happiness is hard to achieve.

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?

God does not work by only one method, paint in only one color, play in only one key, nor does he make only one star shine onto the earth...

Eberhard Arnold

A scientist should not cheat or falsify data or quote out of context or do any other thing that is intellectually dishonest. Of course, as always, some individuals fail; but science as a whole disapproves of such action. Indeed, when transgressors are detected, they are usually expelled from the community.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Jean Baudrillard

What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?

Matthew Crawford

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver.

What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter's superiority in actual practice is undeniable.

It is a mistake, to think the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square, which is the object of touch,be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man, at first sight, from knowing it?

George Berkeley