Quotes by Women Philosophers

By the radiant light of the universal magnetic ocean... electric waves bind the cosmos together.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That's not considered to be a problem. The point is to see it.

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

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 theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

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.

You ought to make every effort to free yourselves even from venial sin, and to do what is most perfect.

Teresa of Ávila

Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts...

Mary Wollstonecraft

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

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.

Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman's but a softer man. And if we take in the consideration, that there can be but one rule of moral excellence for beings made of the same materials, organized after the same manner, and subjected to similar laws of Nature, we must either agree with Mr. Pope, or we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold.

Catharine Macaulay

Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.

Tea seems to tenderize cheap cuts of beef. After cooking chuck, boiling beef and brisket (I even mixed rib eye, which is ever so cheap, and it's great) I have decided that the tannic acid in the tea is what tenderizes beef!

Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.

We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be...

To be conscious of one's weakness and to trust in God's help is the way to authentic strength and victory.

Alice von Hildebrand

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

Every nursing mother, in the midst of her little dependent brood, has far more right to whine, sulk or scold, as temperament dictates, because beefsteak and coffee are not prepared for her and exactly to her taste, than any man ever had or ever can have during the present stage of human evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Now suppose that the clue experiences that can correct the illusion become for some reason increasingly scarce – perhaps because the dominant story itself brings about their elimination! Then the illusion might go on for a very long time, might have to result in real catastrophe, before anyone realizes anything is wrong.

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.

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live?

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?

The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism