Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Ralph Inge

Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.

Richard P. Feynman

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Richelle Mead

You destroy my life then feed me inspirational philosophy.

Roger Martin

When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, 'try it, prototype it, and improve it'.

Umberto Eco

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

Travis Tritt

Please tell me you will remember, no matter how much I do wrong that I had the best of intentions all along.

Reid Hoffman

We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.

William Kristol

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

William James

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.

William James

The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.

William James

To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.

William James

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

William James

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

William James

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

William James

Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.

William James

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

William James

Habit is second nature, or rather . . . ten times nature.

William James

Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.

William James

In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.

William James

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

William James

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

William James

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.

William James

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.

William James

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

William James

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.

William James

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

William James

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

William James

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

William James

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

William Gilmore Simms

Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.

William Gilmore Simms

Philosophy is reason with the eyes of the soul.

William Gilbert

Philosophy is for the few.