Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bertrand Russell

Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.

Bertrand Russell

All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Bertrand Russell

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Bertrand Russell

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Bertrand Russell

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

Bertrand Russell

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe, but look only and surely at what are the facts.

Bertrand Russell

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

Benjamin Cardozo

There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.

Benjamin Disraeli

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Benjamin Disraeli

In the hands of a genius, engineering turns to magic, philosophy becomes poetry, and science pure imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil.

Carl von Clausewitz

[...] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity

C. S. Lewis

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.

Dana Fox

My big philosophy is: Try and work with good people, because the process is your life. That's going to be really, really hard. I'm glad I learned the lesson, 'Failure is OK.

Connor Jessup

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

Arlen Specter

I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,

Pierce Brosnan

My religious philosophy is kindness. Try to be kind. That's something worth achieving.

Albert Einstein

Consider the concepts referred to in the words 'where', 'when', 'why', 'being', to the elucidation of which innumerable volumes of philosophy have been devoted. We fare no better in our speculations than a fish which should strive to become clear as to what is water.

Albert Einstein

Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.

Albert Einstein

When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth.

Albert Einstein

Everything is Energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

Alfred Nobel

I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food.

Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.

Alfred North Whitehead

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

Alfred North Whitehead

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Alfred North Whitehead

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

Alfred North Whitehead

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

Alfred North Whitehead

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

Alfred North Whitehead

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.