Philosopher Quotes - Page 11

• The words 'theory' and 'practice' are of Greek origin; they carry our thoughts back to the ancient philosophers by whom they were contrived, and by whom they were also contrasted and placed in opposition, as denoting two mutually conflicting and mutually inconsistent ideas. ... [this fallacy] based on a double system of natural laws retarded for centuries the development of physical science, notably mechanics.

  William John Macquorn Rankine

  Law, Practice, Ideas

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• Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas........scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.

  Frank J. Tipler

  Emotional, Ideas, Qualms About

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• Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

  William James

  Philosophical, Passion, Men

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.61, 谷月社

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• Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

  Victor Hugo

  Believe, Remembrance, Priests

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1862). “Cosette”, p.135

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• What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Thinking, Language

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.222, Ravenio Books

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• A philosopher is a man who can look at an empty glass with a smile.

  Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

  Men, Glasses, Looks

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• I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!

  Galileo Galilei

  Men, Littles, Reason

  Letter to Fr. Vincenzo Renieri, 1633.

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• If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

  Galileo Galilei

  Believe, Mean, Eye

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• Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipe below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

  Blaise Pascal

  Imagination, Needs, World

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

  Jerry Fodor

  Bad Day, Sometimes, Wonder

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• One of the recurring philosophical questions is: 'Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?' Which says something about the nature of philosophers , because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone.

  Terry Pratchett

  Fall, Philosophical, Squirrels

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Small Gods: (Discworld Novel 13)”, p.10, Random House

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• I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.

  Eugene McCarthy

  Running, Art, Book

  Eugene J. McCarthy (1987). “Up'til Now: A Memoria”, Harcourt

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• I'm the only man; I'm the only philosopher.

  Kedar Joshi

  Men

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• I - a philosopher - live in the cage of flesh and blood.

  Kedar Joshi

  Blood, Flesh, Cages

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• The quarrels of theologians and philosophers have not been about religion, but about philosophy; and philosophers not unfrequently seem to entertain the same feeling toward theologians that sportsmen cherish toward poachers.

  Thomas Huxley

  Philosophy, Feelings, Poachers

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.166, Cambridge University Press

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• I have never come across someone who could inspire more respect than the Greek philosophers.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Inspire, Greek, Greek Philosopher

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• My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application-not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech-and learn them so well that words become works.

  Seneca the Younger

  Teaching, Writing, Happy Life

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• Paul indeed wanted to reveal the unknown God to the philosophers and then affirms of Him, that no human intellect can conceive Him. Therefore, God is revealed therein, that one knows that every intellect is too small to make itself a figuration or concept of Him. However, he names him God, or in Greek, theos.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Names, Greek, Intellect

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• The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Thinking, Accepting, Educated

  Lynn Sherr, Susan B. Anthony (1995). “Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words”, Crown

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• In Old English they don't say I had a dream, but there's another usage of the word - "life is but a dream," to be corny about it. It's implied with eyes wide open, rather than asleep. But I'm not a philosopher to explain myself. I wish I could. Maybe that's why I'm a musician.

  Tom Verlaine

  Dream, Eye, Wish

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• Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.

  Sidney Hook

  Philosophical, Writing, Color

  Sidney Hook (1987). “Out of step: an unquiet life in the 20th century”, Harpercollins

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• A married philosopher is a comic character.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Character, Married, Comic

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• Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Men, Thinking, Bears

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• The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future

  John Maynard Keynes

  Past, Light, Together

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1971). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Essays in biography”

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• Philosophy is the art of dying.Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one's mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live.

  Simon Critchley

  Art, Philosophy, Dying

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