Philosophy Quotes - Page 73

Unalienable rights are essential limitations to all governments.

But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

The province of philosophy is not so much to prevent calamities befalling as to demonstrate that they are blessings when they have taken place.

He who says either that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it has passed.

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

Philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

This incomparable Author having at length been prevailed upon to appear in public, has in this Treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the Mind; and has at once shown what are the Principles of Natural Philosophy, and so far derived from them their consequences, that he seems to have exhausted his Argument, and left little to be done by those that shall succeed him.a

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

You can never forget the time you are living in because the past is the past and it will never come back. So to adjust your philosophy and creativity in fashion to the time you’re living in is the most important thing.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living. In an earthly tapestry hung from the skyline of smoldering cities so gray and so vulgar, as not to be satisfied with their own negativity, but needing to touch all the living as well.

I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

I'm drawn between the light and dark.

Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.

I'm big into social studies, the humanities. I really love history and world issues and philosophy and law.

If at first you don't succeed, then drag racing isn't for you.

I'm sure there's some philosophy that says one of the best ways to deal with any of your problems is to take a deep breath and step away from them for a while, writing does this for me.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is The Brothers Karamazov.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.