Philosopher Quotes

To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.

Learning and enjoyment are the secret to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, enjoyment without learning dulls you.

Richard David Precht

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.

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?

It is only a world embodying the principle of relativity, in the form which the doctrine entails, that can be said to exhibit the character of mind, with its exclusion of disconnected fragments and relations.

Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane

I recall an incident involving the late George Stigler at a conference in Spain in the 1980s. Hearing that I had written a book on reason and natural law, Stigler started to ridicule reason, going so far as to say that there is as much reason in a monkey's antics as in any human act. At that point I asked him whether he was trying to tell me something about how he wrote his books; he gave me a blank stare and stormed out of the room.

To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.

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 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.

What is a scientist?...We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.

Maria Montessori

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

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

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Nicholas Murray Butler

For Kant, the predisposition to good (like Calvin's 'seed of goodness') is in one way more fundamental to us than the overlying propensity to evil, and in one way it is less fundamental. The predisposition to good is more fundamental because it is essential to us; we cannot lose it without ceasing to be human. The propensity to evil is in that way less fundamental, because we can lose it, and indeed we should lose it, without ceasing to be human. On the other hand, the propensity to evil is in a different way more fundamental. It is our root maxim when we are born.

For our intellectual spirit has the power of fire in itself. For no other purpose is it sent by God to the earth than that it glow and grow into a flame. When it is excited by admiration, then it grows, just as if the wind entering into a fire excited its potential to actuality. If we apprehend the works of God, we marvel at eternal wisdom.

Nicholas of Cusa

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.

Factual assertions and fundamental principles are...merely parts of theories: they are given within the framework of a theory; they are chosen and valid within this framework; and subsequently they are dependent upon it. This holds for all empirical sciences—for the natural sciences as well as those pertaining to history.

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.

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.

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

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

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

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

Just as the hand that strikes the ground cannot fail,
So is the ruin certain of him who cherishes anger.

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.