Philosophy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

This evolution theory is the foundation philosophy for humanism. Humanism is the idea that man is God. After all, there is no God out there, so we must be God. The Bible says, "They did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind." Do humanists believe in a supreme being? Emphatically, yes, that supreme being is man. Humanists have no knowledge of any being more supreme. The turning point in history will be the moment that man becomes aware that the only God of man is man himself.

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

Another recent development is the theory of formal organizations, that is, structures planfully instituted, such as those of an army, Bureaucracy, business enterprise, etc. This theory is framed in a philosophy which accepts the premise that the only meaningful way to study organization is to study it as a system.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy.

Krist Novoselic

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

Alain de Botton

Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Just how we fit into the plans of the Great Architect and how much He has assigned us to do, we do not know, but if we fail in our assignment it is pretty certain that part of the job will be left undone. But fit in we certainly do somehow, else we would not have a sense of our own responsibility. A purely materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence.

Robert Andrews Millikan

The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

Herbert Spencer

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Our base philosophy is to never fear cannibalization. If we do, somebody else will just cannibalize it. We never fear it.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.

But absolutely nothing remains of that one and only medicament of which Hippocrates makes mention (darkly and mystically, I admit) in several places, and still less are its operations understood, inasmuch as no one now searches with lynx-like eyes into the profound depths of true natural philosophy, to gain an accurate knowledge of its composition and its virtues.

To some people cricket is a circus show upon which they may or may not find it worth while to spend sixpence. To others it is a cult and a philosophy, and these last will neve be understood by the profanum vulgus, nor by the merchant-minded nor by the unphysically intellectual.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Terry Pratchett

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

Albert Schweitzer

A character on how he chose his university course:

Almost everyone who didn't know what to do, did philosophy. Well, that's logical.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

While the viewpoints offered by Johnson are rooted in a long-held and consistent philosophy that can be evaluated by those who agree with him, and those who do not, the viewpoints offered by Trump seem to change like the leaves that change their colors when summer gives way to fall. We know what Johnson believes today, and will believe tomorrow. Can anyone suggest we know what Trump will believe tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow?

Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.

H. P. Lovecraft

As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people.

William Barrett

The price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.

Mathematical activity has taken the forms of a science, a philosophy and an art.

George Frederick James Temple

Dorland and I knew it was stretching the boundaries of our philosophy to believe that people like Jordan existed outside mental homes and city hairdressing salons, but there she was. Fourteen and already harbouring a deep yearning to be an actor.