Famous Quotes & Sayings

Terry Pratchett

Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

Terry Pratchett

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.

Margaret Mead

A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.

Michael Faraday

There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle

Michael Bloomberg

Neither party has God on its side, a monopoly on good ideas, or a lock on any single fiscal, social, or moral philosophy.

Melissa Etheridge

I could have been you, you could have been me. One small change that shapes your destiny.

Melissa Marr

Choose to be happy. It is what we have all done.

Meat Loaf

We carry the flame for all to see, the fire and passion of what we can be.

Meat Loaf

Life is a lemon and I want my money back.

Meat Loaf

You can lose yourself in pleasure, 'til your body's going numb, but will it ever be enough.

Meat Loaf

Who am I, why am I here? Forget the question, someone give me another beer.

Max Muller

The gospel is the fulfillment of all hopes, the perfection of all philosophy, the interpretation of all revelation, the key to all the seeming contradictions of the physical and moral world.

Matthew Scully

When we call something unfair or indecent or unconscionable or evil, when we speak of mercy and pity and compassion, those words have meaning, regardless of our particular faith or moral philosophy. They appeal to common standards we all are expected to understand and accept, standards without which we could not live any common life at all..

Matthew Vaughn

I had a philosophy, which may have been proven right, that directing isn't as hard as everyone says it is.

Maya Angelou

Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

Matthew Arnold

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Meg Cabot

But I intend to enjoy the weeks I have left with you to the fullest. Because I know from my study of the philosophy of time, whatever is going to happen in the future is already unavoidable.

Maxim Gorky

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

Maxim Gorky

The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.

Max Stirner

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!

Max Black

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

Max Born

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

Max Born

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

Max Born

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

Marina Warner

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.

Marilynne Robinson

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

Maria Montessori

We cannot create observers by saying 'observe,' but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.

Patricia Heaton

I find it impossible to subscribe to a philosophy that believes that the destruction of human life is a legitimate solution to a problem that is mostly social, economic and psychological,... In reality, most women 'choose' abortion because they believe they have no other choice.

Plato

Wonder [said Socrates] is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this.