Famous Quotes & Sayings

Aleksandar Hemon

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

Aldo Leopold

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

Albert Einstein

Now to the term 'relativity theory.' I admit that it is unfortunate, and has given occasion to philosophical misunderstandings.

Albert Schweitzer

To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought.

E. O. Wilson

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Dalai Lama

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

Dalai Lama

The past is past, and the future is yet to come. That means the future is in your hands - the future entirely depends on the present. That realization gives you a great responsibility.

Anaxagoras

In everything, there is a share of everything

Anita Brookner

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Czeslaw Milosz

The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

D. A. Carson

Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

D. H. Lawrence

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

David Foster Wallace

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

David Cronenberg

As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel.

David Harvey

There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?

Confucius

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Daniel Tammet

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

Albert Schweitzer

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Albert Camus

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

Albert Camus

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

Annie Besant

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

...and our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.

Andre Gide

To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.

Robert Fripp

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

Rene Descartes

Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.

Rene Descartes

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

Rene Descartes

Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Rene Descartes

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

Rene Descartes

De omnibus dubitandum

Thomas Huxley

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

Robert McKee

Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both.

Robert Anton Wilson

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.