Philosophy Quotes - Page 165

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

Philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn't recognize their special credentials. It's the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that's accessible to the general public.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented.

One way ... in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.

The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with "Reason" in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.

Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral?

A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.

What are we living for? Two roomed apartment on the second floor?

Before you condemn me my friends, I suggest you look deep inside you. For good and evil exists in us all.

Surviving, that's my plan.

Taken everything I've got, all I've got's this sunny afternoon.

The intellectual controls the spiritual, the animal respects the natural.

Why bear malice? Just let it go. So what of pride? It will swallow you whole.

It's never too late to get a new design, and if you wanna compete you gotta visualize.

On the surface I'm a mild mannered person, that's until you scratch the animal inside.

A restless spirit who can't reach his goal, can't find a home until I've found my soul.

I close my eyes and feel the universe within me.

Goods gone bad, but right is wrong, and I don't know which side I'm on lately.

To the field we are scattered from the day we are born to grow wild and sleep rough til from the earth we are torn.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.

The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.