Philosopher Quotes - Page 32

• On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Les Miserable, Priests

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.2609, Delphi Classics

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• Summer weather, like being in love,is a philosopher's stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day ... For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.

  Nan Fairbrother

  Summer, Being In Love, Love Is

  Nan Fairbrother (1954). “An English Year”

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• All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.

  Heinrich Heine

  Eyeglasses, Knowing, Lenses

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• Cavendish was a great Man with extraordinary singularities-His voice was squeaking his manner nervous He was afraid of strangers & seemed when embarrassed to articulate with difficulty-He wore the costume of our grandfathers. Was enormously rich but made no use of his wealth... He Cavendish lived latterly the life of a solitary, came to the Club dinner & to the Royal Society: but received nobody at his home. He was acute sagacious & profound & I think the most accomplished British Philosopher of his time.

  Humphry Davy

  Home, Men, Thinking

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• Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

  Thomas Huxley

  Philosophical, Gun, Hail

  "Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews".

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• For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.

  W. W. Rouse Ball

  Science, Newton, Used

  W. W. Rouse Ball (2012). “A Short Account of the History of Mathematics”, p.352, Courier Corporation

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• Historically the most striking result of Kant's labors was the rapid separation of the thinkers of his own nation and, though less completely, of the world, into two parties;-the philosophers and the scientists.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Party, Science, Two

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• In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?

  John Dewey

  Kings, Office, Letters

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• It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

  Albert Einstein

  Men, Poor, He Man

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.116, Open Road Media

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• It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

  Lionel Trilling

  Science, Class, Names

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.425, Northwestern University Press

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• People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Upon appointment as the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Berlin, formed for the advancement of science.

  Adolf von Harnack

  Our Generation, Names, People

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• Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Science, Littles, Strange

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• Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it's fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Sky, Earth, Permit

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• Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Science, Sheep, Heaven

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• What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Understanding, Definitions

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.730, Modern Library

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• Zoological taxonomists in general are inclined to be practical workers rather than philosophers, if only because they face such an unending task that they are not encouraged to sit back and philosophize.

  Richard E. Blackwelder

  Tasks, Faces, Unending

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• Look not for refuge to anyone beside yourself. Heed fast to the truth as a lamp.

  Gautama Buddha

  Lamps, Looks, Refuge

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• Wisdom, humanity & courage, these three are universal virtues. The way by which they are practiced are one.

  Confucius

  Humanity, Three, Way

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• Just as it is agreed that we all wish to be happy, so it is that we all wish to be wise, since no one without wisdom is happy.

  Saint Augustine

  Wise, Wish, Being Wise

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• The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

  David Hume

  Perception, Mind, Kind

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.534

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• It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

  Immanuel Kant

  Philosophy, Knowing, Limits

  Immanuel Kant (1963). “Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason”

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• We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Lying, Men, Play

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “The World as Will and Representation”, p.532, Courier Corporation

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• All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Hands, Alive, Existential

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1996). “The Vision of Nietzsche”, Element Books Limited

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• Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Discovery, Two

  Letter to J.S. Switzer on April 23, 1953. "The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry". Book by H. Floris Cohen, p. 234, 1994.

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• It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

  A.J. Ayer

  Past, Superstitions, Way

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