Philosopher Quotes - Page 15

• Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

  Hannah Arendt

  Confusion

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• Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

  Francis Bacon

  Stars, Philosophy, Light

  Francis Bacon (1765). “The works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, in five volumes”, p.186

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• Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.

  Gil Amelio

  Errors, Hemlock, Done

  Gil Amelio, William L. Simon (1998). “On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers

  E. O. Wilson

  Believe, Thinking, Ideas

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• Why do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries.

  Irwin Corey

  Shoes, Two, Tennis

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• Out of Frederic Remington's Sundown Leflare graved on the mantel. Sundown and another mountain man cooked and ate their supper. "Then," says Remington, "they sat down with the greatest philosopher on earth - the fire."

  J. Frank Dobie

  Men, Fire, Mountain

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• I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.

  Peter Kreeft

  Mother, Powerful, Prayer

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• Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.

  Robert Heilbroner

  Philosophy, Men, Wealth

  The Worldly Philosophers introduction (1953)

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• Aristotle wore many rings and expensive clothes. ... Plato found this off-putting and unsuited for a philosopher.

  Claudius Aelianus

  Plato, Clothes, Found

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• A philosopher will not believe what he sees because he is too busy speculating about what he does not see.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Believe, Doe, Busy

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• Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people - it is often very dangerous to do things at all - and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people.

  T. H. White

  Mean, Race, Ideas

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Pilots

  George Bernard Shaw (2012). “Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy”, p.203, The Floating Press

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• Philosophers say that perfection is unattainable. Lithographers redefine perfection according to SEMI standards.

  Ken Goldberg

  Perfection, Unattainable, Standards

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.

  Simon Critchley

  Revenge, Philosophy, Thinking

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• Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Two, Hours, Kicks

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