Philosopher Quotes

Riches are a cause of evil, not because, of themselves, they do any evil, but because they goad men on so that they are ready to do evil.

I am so far from thinking the maxims of Confucius and Jesus Christ to differ, that I think the plain and simple maxims of the former, will help to illustrate the more obscure ones of the latter, accommodated to the then way of speaking.

Remote fountains are of little help to nearby fires.

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

The Aegean sea washes Greece on two sides: first, the side that faces towards the east and stretches from Sunium, towards the north as far as the Thermaean Gulf and Thessaloniceia, a Macedonian city...; and secondly, the side that faces towards the south, I mean the Macedonian country, extending from Thessaloniceia as far as the Strymon.

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

Jacob Needleman

There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him.

The best physicians must be the best observers, but the man who sees keenly, who hears clearly, and whose senses, powerful at the start, are sharpened and refined by constant exercise, will only in exceptional instances be a visionary or a dreamer.

Theodor Gomperz

When writers with the reputation of intelligent and perceptive critics of human life teach us, day in and day out, that vileness is distinguishable from decency only in respect of being less hypocritical, … it is small wonder that ordinary people come to disbelieve in any objective principles by appeal to which one form of conduct can be regarded as morally better than another.

R. W. K. Paterson

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

Since money belongs to the community … it would seem that the community may control it as it wills, and therefore may make as much profit from alteration as it likes, and treat money as its own property.

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

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

Hope provides comfort, and hope does not always require probability.

All forms of yoga involve occult assumptions, even hatha yoga, which is often presented as a merely physical discipline.

Douglas Groothuis

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

According to Luther everyone judges everyone. This is because there's an intense desire to be judging. Then those of us on the masochistic side of things want to be judged. Thus we publish. We teach. We learn. We beg to be judged and decimated.

What was always was, and always shall be. For, if it came into being, necessarily, before its generation, there was nothing; so, if there were nothing, nothing at all would come from nothing.

Melissus of Samos

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

Baltasar Gracián

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

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

Jean-François Revel

A good man never wholly perishes, the best part of his being outlives in eternity.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species.

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

Carlos Bernardo González Pecotche

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.