Philosopher Quotations | Page 2

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

To grow a philosopher's beard.

No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.

If Socrates died like a philosopher, Jesus Christ died like a God.

Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I'm primarily a playboy philosopher.

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian.

The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.

Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

Philosophers say that perfection is unattainable. Lithographers redefine perfection according to SEMI standards.

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.

According to the saying of an ancient philosopher, one should eat to live, and not live to eat

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

Nothing is too absurd to be said by some of the philosophers.

As a philosopher, I have a right to ask for a rational explanation of religious faith.

How do our philosophers act? Do they not inscribe their signatures to the very essays they write on the propriety of despising glory.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.

For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.

Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!

Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

Before researchers become researches they should become philosophers.

We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet; but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.

The visible world was only an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, which the Philosopher sought to transcend.

Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.

Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

All are sure in their days except the most wise ... He is the wisest philosopher who holds his theory with some doubt.

The French have never produced a great philosopher. Great wine maybe, but no great philosophers.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.

The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

I also dreamt about finally meeting the leftist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He is a great role model for me.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.

It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher

Philosophy is everybody's business.

Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.

Philosophy has a fine saying for everything.-For Death it has an entire set.

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.

Clearness marks the sincerity of philosophers.

Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers.

A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

Earnsha was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.

What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.

The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

As a bio-philosopher - as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself - through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives.

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

The highest philosophers, in explaining the mystery of this world, are obliged to call in the aid of another.

If your divines are not philosophers, your philosophy will neither be divine, nor able to divine.

The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Know that the philosopher has power over the stars, and not the stars over him.

Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.

... the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...

Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.

In fact, of course, I hold that propositions that contemporary philosophers would properly count as 'empirical' can be necessary and be known to be such.

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha. Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.