Some Philosophical Quotes

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. ~ Abraham Lincoln

An even more important philosophical contact was with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began as my pupil and ended as my supplanter at both Oxford and Cambridge. He had intended to become an engineer and had gone to Manchester for that purpose. The training for an engineer required mathematics, and he was thus led to interest in the foundations of mathematics. He inquired at Manchester whether there was such a subject and whether anybody worked at it. They told him about me, and so he came to Cambridge. He was queer, and his notions seemed to me odd, so that for a whole term I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric. At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?" I replied, "My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?" He said, "Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher." I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him: "No, you must not become an aeronaut." And he didn't.
The collected papers of Bertrand Russell: Last Philosophical Testament ~ Bertrand Russell

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity. ~ Richard P. Feynman

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either. ~ Peter Singer

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art. ~ Jack Bowman

It is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent pain. ~ Martin Luther

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy. ~ Peter L. Berger

That's why we need to practice the presence of God: Not just to acknowledge in some philosophical way that God is present, but to rehearse, to repeat, to work and rework our knowledge that even though we don't see Him and sometimes don't feel Him, He is there. He is here. When we practice the presence of God, we train ourselves to desire His presence - to resist our temptation to flee Him. We also train ourselves to experience His presence - to resist our temptation to think that He flees us. In other words, the practice of the presence of God helps us to live between the temptations of Jonah bound for Tarshish and John bound in prison. Jonah is the prophet who wants to abandon God. John is the prophet who feels abandoned by God. ~ Mark Buchanan

Without question, the single most important attribute of a successful entrepreneur is integrity. And that's not some philosophical or theoretical malarkey; it's hard-nosed fact. ~ David S. Rose

the illusion is encouraged that philosophy is an irrelevant, abstract subject - part of the decoration of a cultured life perhaps, but unnecessary in and even distracting from the activities of the practical world. The truth is, however, that all nontrivial activity presupposed some philosophical point of view and that not to recognize this is to make oneself the ready victim of bad or at the very least inadequate philosophy. ~ Michael Macintyre

The reality of the Islamic metaphysical world was not taken seriously despite the fact that Iqbal, who was the ideological founder of Pakistan, had shown much interest in Islamic philosophy, although I do not think that he is really a traditional Islamic philosopher. He himself was influenced by Western philosophy, but at least was intelligent enough to realize the significance of Islamic philosophy. The problem with him was that he did not know Arabic well enough. His Persian was very good, but he could not read all the major texts of Islamic philoso- phy, which are written mostly in Arabic. Nevertheless, he wrote on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and he had some philosophical substance, much more than the other famous reformers who are men- tioned all the time, such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Muh:ammad 'Abduh. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings. ~ James H. Cone

I got married because I fell in love with this woman. I had a baby with her because we wanted to have children. But that's not because of some philosophical ideal at all, no. ~ Ewan McGregor

The whole thrust of yogic philosophical and scientific inquiry has therefore been to examine the nature of being, with a view to learning to respond to the stresses of life without so many tremors and troubles. ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves poison the fountain. ~ John Locke

The law always limits every power it gives. ~ David Hume

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

What he saw seemed to be the very idea of a city, barnacled and thick with itself. ~ David Edison

There is need for another logic... We need another logic solely because what is called logic is not a logic at all and has nothing in common anymore with philosophy... logic should change; logic should become philosophical! ~ Martin Heidegger

No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise? ~ Terry Pratchett

That's an interesting philosophical question. When your boner goes away, is that one gone ... forever? ~ Adam Carolla

Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free. ~ Daniel Delgado F.

What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical. ~ Elaine Pagels

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Why am I here?" Wukong chuckles, throwing his head back in unrestrained glee. "A philosophical question! The answer is simple: to learn and to grow." "No, I mean, why am I here right now?" The Buddha cocks his head at me and shrugs. "The answer is the same, and will remain the same days and months and years hence. ~ Kevin Hearne

Every great philosophical shift in history began with a single bold idea. ~ Dan Brown

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. ~ John Searle

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Angling is tightly woven in a fabric of moral, social, and philosophical threads which are not easily rent by the violent climate of our times. ~ A.J. McClane

Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice. ~ Aleister Crowley

He who coordinates his thoughts with his actions controls his own destiny." ~ Amunhotep El Bey ~ Amunhotep El Bey

Other feelings too can be philosophical - pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation - if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. "I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind" is the opening of Alexander Radishchev's "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child's tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide. ~ Mikhail Epstein

In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it's a broadening I'd like to see happen. ~ Philip Kitcher

We are each a dozen people who were all the same child. ~ Robert Breault

Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person. ~ Virgil

Life is a constant process of dying. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you. ~ Antonio Porchia

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. ~ Tom Robbins

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Oh for love of the Gods, thought Jim. The last thing I need right now is philosophical discussion with a madman, on a snowy roof, about the merits of capitalism. ~ Tony Rattigan

Happiness is the highest good ~ Aristotle.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

People are not measured by their accomplishments, but by how many times they screw up trying to achieve them. ~ James McGregor

Sometimes the answer is in the question. ~ Cristina Smith

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, "Either I am much deceived,
or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse." To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: " 'Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with a
double L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135). ~ Charles Edward Trinkaus

A well-adjusted person wouldn't talk much. There's not a lot to be said about most of life. Most days, weeks, years, lives, nothing happens... and still we carry on chattering at each other. ~ James Ferron Anderson

I really can't stomach you when you get all philosophical. ~ Maya Banks

I think about celestial junk. Like, maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility of every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed them, and turn them to social account. ~ Rudolf Rocker

Betemit's positional flexibility is the same as yours: He can stand around and muse about the great philosophical debates of our day anywhere on the field. Catching and throwing the baseball is an entirely different question. ~ Baseball Prospectus

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. ~ Julian Baggini

--perhaps monsters were misunderstood gods; deities with plans too grand for humans; a phantom of evil that drank from the roots of good. ~ Roshani Chokshi

Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying. ~ Ram Dass