Philosophy Quotes - Page 188

We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy—material or spiritual.

Plato's cave is full of freaks.

I think what I'm trying to do, reform-wise, is completely consistent with conservative philosophy. It may not be consistent with some so-called conservatives who live in Washington and make their living like I used to.

Without time,” the angel said, “you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity.” “FYI, philosophy bores me.” “Not philosophy. Reality. Time is what gives life significance.

Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

My philosophy: find what it is you want to say, walk in the room, say it, and get the hell out.

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

Cinema for me is an area of philosophy and artistic statement.

When you talk about a million bucks, if you think about it very carefully, it's not that much money, if you start to divide it. You have to figure out a philosophy as to whom you want to give it to.

Sometimes I wonder if he has a philosophy. Maybe even a worldview. I'd like to sit down with him and pick his brain, just a tiny bit somewhere in the frontal lobe to get a taste of his thoughts. But he's too much of a toughguy to ever be that vulnerable. - R on M

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.

The final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.

Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try ... The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must forever try to reach enlightenment.

Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.

Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.

Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.

There are two competing philosophies in Wool: one is that people have to live under an iron thumb in order to survive, and the other one is that everyone should live completely freely and happily and everything will sort itself out.

Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purposes, whether of good or of evil.

To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.

There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.