Philosopher Quotes - Page 38

• Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

  Allan Bloom

  Greek, Forget, Professors

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• The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

  Allan Bloom

  Economic, Psychological, Theoretical

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.245, Simon and Schuster

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• The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

  Margaret Mead

  Cutting, Science, Giving

  Margaret Mead (1973). “Coming of Age in Samoa”

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• The philosopher caught in the nets of language.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Language, Caught

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• Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

  Paul Bloom

  Men, Animal, Sticks

  Paul Bloom (2011). “How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like”, p.52, Random House

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• What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Philosophical, Men

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1979). “Philosophy and truth: selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870's”, Humanities Pr

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• This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Artist, Ideas

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• Can an ass be tragic?--To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Bears, Ass

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• When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophical, Hero, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2000). “Walden and Other Writings: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.774, Modern Library

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• The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.

  Jonathan Swift

  Differences, Mind, World

  Jonathan Swift (1856). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: Containing Interesting and Valuable Papers, Not Hitherto Published ... With Memoir of the Author”, p.285

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• A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Poetry, Age, Honey

  Henry David Thoreau (1993). “Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophical, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.105, Xist Publishing

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• On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Wise, Wisdom

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers (Annotated Edition)”, p.103, Jazzybee Verlag

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• What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• Until philosophers hold power, neither states nor individuals will have rest from trouble.

  Plato

  Philosophical, Unrest, Politics

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• In a world of universal poverty
  The philosophers alone will be fat
  Against the autumn winds
  In an autumn that will be perpetual.

  Wallace Stevens

  Philosophical, Autumn, Wind

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.152, Vintage

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• Philosophy can add to our happiness in no other manner but by diminishing our misery; it should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of. Happy were we all born philosophers; all born with a talent of thus dissipating our own cares by spreading them upon all mankind.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Philosophy, Care, Add

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “Enquiry into the present state of polite learning. The citizen of the world”, p.234

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• Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known. This was the sound conclusion of the Academic sceptics, who were the least surly of philosophers.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Sound, Affair, Academic

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• Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

  Blaise Pascal

  Philosophical, Writing, Heart

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pensées”, p.46, Courier Corporation

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• True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect.... To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

  Blaise Pascal

  Philosophy, Light, Morality

  Blaise Pascal (2009). “Thoughts”, p.16, Lulu.com

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• My doctor said to me afterwards, 'When you were ill you behaved like a true philosopher. Every time you came to yourself you made a joke.' I never had a compliment that pleased me more.

  Bertrand Russell

  Doctors, Compliment, Made

  Bertrand Russell (1967). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914-1944: 1914/1944”

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• The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery on the other hand is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship, the power of proselytism.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Light, Mystery, Aspire

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations", 10th edition, 1919.

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• A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

  Stendhal

  Marriage, Heart, Boredom

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black: World Classics”, p.168, World Classic

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• And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

  Norman Mailer

  God, Time, Sex

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Deer Park: A Novel”, p.368, Random House

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• But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

  Walter Bagehot

  World, Pure, Nations

  Walter Bagehot (1930). “The English Constitution: And Other Political Essays”, p.57, Lulu.com

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