Famous Quotes & Sayings

Steven Pinker

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels... Our minds evolved... to solve problems, [not]... to answer any question we are capable of asking.

Susan Howatch

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

Steven Weinberg

How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data.

Ray Bradbury

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Slavoj Zizek

For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

Rajneesh

If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible - only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.

Rajneesh

My love is unconditional. Your action is irrelevant.

Socrates

An unexamined life is a life of no account.

Socrates

I only know one thing, and that is I know nothing

Socrates

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

Socrates

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Socrates

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

The only thing I know is that I know nothing

Socrates

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Socrates

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

Michelle Shocked

Their lives ran in circles so small They thought they'd seen it all

Michael Servetus

In the Bible, there is no mention of the Trinity. . . . We get to know God, not through our proud philosophical concepts, but through Christ.

Misha Collins

The philosophical underpinnings of my approach to acting are that there are universal human qualities, and that every character is actually available within each one of us, that if we tap down into that universal humanness, we can find whatever character it is that we need to play already there within ourselves, and it's just a matter of peeling apart the onion that is you and finding that character within you, because of this universal human quality.

Ted Cruz

If we look at it more from a philosophical standpoint, these foundations of atheism and secular humanism believe that you are your own God. That leads us to something that unfortunately has crept into many churches across America, and it is what I call the Social Gospel. The social gospel, that could creep into something that is called Liberation Theology, which is a mixture of leftist, pseudo-Christianity with Marxism.

Theodore Sturgeon

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Maxine Hong Kingston

There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.

P. J. O'Rourke

A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.

Plato

That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless

Plato

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

Plato

A state arises,as I conceive,out of the needs of mankind;no one is self-sufficing,but all of us have many wants

Plato

My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power - are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?

Plato

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Plato

Until philosophers hold power, neither states nor individuals will have rest from trouble.

Plato

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.

Plato

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

Plato

The learning and knowledge that we have,is,at the most,but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

Plato

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

Plato

Man never legislates,but destinies and accidents,happening in all sorts of ways,legislate in all sorts of ways.