Philosophical Quotes - Page 54

It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.

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.

Reason has, especially today, many other manifestations than philosophical ones.

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.

Necessity, the mother of invention.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

The study of the human brain and its disease remains one of the greatest scientific and philosophical challenges ever undertaken.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

Justice... is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

The definition of deism is the philosophical idea of God as a first cause of the universe, who lays down the laws of nature and lets them run like clockwork, indifferent to the fate of the people subject to them.

To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.

THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals.

Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.

From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

This prophecy of a coming enlightenment is echoed in virtually every faith and philosophical tradition on Earth. Hindus call it the Krita Age, astrologers call it the Age of Aquarius, the Jews describe the coming of the Messiah, theosophists call it the New Age, cosmologists call it Harmonic Convergence and predict the actual date of December 21, 2012.