Philosophic Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

  William James

  Philosophy, Mind, Should

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.16, Xist Publishing

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called "emotion" and its concomitant of evaluation.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Mean, Quality, Vexation

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition”, p.138, University of Chicago Press

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.

  Bertrand Russell

  Doe, May, Littles

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.31, Routledge

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• If a philosophic theory is once ruled out of court, no one can tell when it will appear again.

  Morris Raphael Cohen

  Court, Theory, Ifs

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• Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré had, and none in his superior in the gift of clear exposition.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Men, Vision, Lasts

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• No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems

  Anna Garlin Spencer

  Art, Children, Husband

  Anna Garlin Spencer (1908). “Woman's Share in Social Culture”

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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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• Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

  Aristotle

  Nature, Great Poetry, Poetry Is

  "Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation".

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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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