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Etienne Gilson Quotes

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

Etienne Gilson
History, Historical, Tests

Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good and who enjoys them as beautiful. For all that which is, down to the humblest form of existence, exhibits the inseparable privileges of being, which are truth, goodness, and beauty.

Etienne Gilson
Beautiful, Men, Thinking

Why are there organized beings? Why is there something rather than nothing? Here again, I fully understand a scientist who refuses to ask it. He is welcome to tell me that the question does not make sense. Scientifically speaking, it does not. Metaphysically speaking, however, it does. Science can account for many things in the world; it may some day account for all that which the world of phenomena actually is. But why anything at all is, or exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even ask the question.

Etienne Gilson
Science, Understanding, Doe

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Etienne Gilson
Philosophy, Undertaker

Let us ... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it.

Etienne Gilson
Past, Today, Way

Faith comes to intelligence as a light that overflows it with joy and inspires it with a certitude that does away with question.

Etienne Gilson
Light, Joy, Catholic
Etienne Gilson (1962). “The Philosopher and Theology”, New York : Random House

Humans feel at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.

Etienne Gilson
Home, Law, Essence

To minds tormented by the divine thirst, it is useless to offer the most certain knowledge of the laws of numbers and the arrangement of the universe

Etienne Gilson
Law, Numbers, Mind

Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful: it is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind, and makes us want to perceive it again

Etienne Gilson
Beautiful, Eye, Mind
Étienne Gilson (1976). “The arts of the beautiful”, Greenwood Publishing Group

If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics.

Etienne Gilson
Adventure, Analysis, Fundamentals

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