Philosophic Quotes - Page 3

• I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

  John Dewey

  Thinking, Venture, Neglect

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Sidney Ratner (2008). “The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925 - 1953: 1931-1932, Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany”, p.5, SIU Press

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• I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and cultureof their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.

  John Dewey

  Philosophical, Ideas, Links

  John Dewey, Larry Hickman, Thomas M. Alexander (1998). “The Essential Dewey: Pragmatism, education, democracy”, p.214, Indiana University Press

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• The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.

  William James

  Philosophical, Men, Views

  William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.52, Routledge

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• Philosophic argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe, in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me that

  Daniel Webster

  Faith, Heart, Vastness

  Daniel Webster (1853). “The Life, Eulogy, and Great Orations of Daniel Webster”, p.32

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• The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence.

  George Sarton

  Pie, Way, Absence

  George Sarton (1918). “The Teaching of the History of Science”

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• In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

  William James

  Real, Views, Sweat

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.26, 谷月社

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• There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Philosophy, Numbers, People

  Alfred North Whitehead (1997). “Science and the Modern World”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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• I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Insanity, Insane, Switzerland

  Francis August Schaeffer (1976). “How should we then live?: the rise and decline of western thought and culture”, Good News Pub

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• I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish. ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.

  George Henry Borrow

  Hero, Race, People

  George Henry Borrow (1852). “Roving Adventures, Or Lavengro: The Scholar - the Gipsy - the Priest”, p.138

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• A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Alive, Detectives

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• Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

  Karl Jaspers

  Thinking, Self, Accomplishment

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• Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.

  Raya Dunayevskaya

  Democracy, Revolution, Action

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• He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Education, Religious, Building Up

  D. H. Lawrence, David Farmer, David R. Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, John Worthen (1987). “Women in Love”, p.495, Cambridge University Press

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• The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.

  Claude Bernard

  Freedom, Science, Medicine

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.

  Claude Bernard

  Science, Observation, Teach

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.35, Courier Corporation

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• If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Wise, Art, Intelligent

  Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.295, Simon and Schuster

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• This work, though it deals only with eating and drinking, which are regarded in the eyes of our supernaturalistic mock-culture as the lowest acts, is of the greatest philosophic significance and importance... How former philosophers have broken their heads over the question of the bond between body and soul! Now we know, on scientific grounds, what the masses know from long experience, that eating and drinking hold together body and soul, that the searched-for bond is nutrition.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Drinking, Food, Eye

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• Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

  E. M. Forster

  Men, Trying, Majority

  E.M. Forster “Howards End”, Рипол Классик

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• In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

  Aleister Crowley

  Book, Reality, May

  "Book VI: Liber O". Book by Aleister Crowley, hermetic.com. 1909.

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• We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Adventure, Dark, Issues

  "Hayek on a Society Based on Freedom" by Scott Horton, harpers.org. August 08, 2007.

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• I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

  Patti Smith

  Philosophy, Believe, People

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• I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Powerful, Men, Self

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• The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

  William Winwood Reade

  Curiosity, Expansion, Inquiry

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.394

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• Whoever accepts the higher mission of art and comes nearer and nearer to it through his creative activity, will then go on from art to the Spirit deep within his own self... The philosophic search for enlightenment and the artist's search for perfection of work can meet and unite. Art can be a path to spiritual enlightenment but not to complete and lasting enlightenment. It can be born out of, and can give birth itself to, only Glimpses. For art is a search for beauty, which by itself is not enough. Beauty must be supported by virtue and both require wisdom to guide them.

  Paul Brunton

  Spiritual, Art, Self

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• If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

  James Madison

  Patriotic, Liberty, Majority

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