Famous Quotes & Sayings

Roger Scruton

The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

Roger Scruton

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Roger Ebert

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Roger Ebert

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Rod Stewart

Life is so brief and time is a thief when you're undecided.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Willard Van Orman Quine

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.

Willard Van Orman Quine

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

Willard Van Orman Quine

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

Wilbur Smith

They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.

Ronald Reagan

I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state... But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet, indeed, they deny the existence of God.

Saina Nehwal

My philosophy is to not be scared of anyone. If I play well, great; if I dont, I learn from the match and move on.

Saint Augustine

Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.

W. E. B. Du Bois

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

Zack Snyder

For whatever reason I was always obsessed with the potential of humanity's physicality. Especially since we grew up with such a non-physical philosophy.

Zack Snyder

You can't will something into being. If you follow that philosophy all the way, to will something into being, that's animal style. That's what man does. But if you're looking at the philosophy correctly, and I never did - I like to think I did sometimes - you have to do it without ego, without the I. You have to separate yourself.

Zane Grey

A good rule of angling philosophy is not to interfere with any fishermans ways of being happy, unless you want to be hated.

Ziggy Marley

I make music that I know that people will enjoy, and balance the ideas and philosophy that we put in music with music that when we play it live, people can move to it and groove to it.

Ziggy Marley

Reggae has a philosophy, you know? It's not just entertainment. There's an idea behind it, a way of life behind the music, which is a positive way of life, which is a progressive way of life for better people.

Trofim Lysenko

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

William Graham Sumner

We live in a war of two antagonistic ethical philosophies, the ethical policy taught in the books and schools, and the success policy.

William H. Gass

I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

William Godwin

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

William Golding

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

Wilfred Owen

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

Waylon Jennings

If I could only fly, you see, a lot of my problems would be gone. When you think of just how much I'd save on shoes alone.

Waylon Jennings

I'm just a man, no more or no less. Bad as the worst, good as the best.

Walter Jon Williams

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Walter Kaufmann

Philosophy means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly.

Walter Kaufmann

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life-that is the heart of existentialism.

Voltaire

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Voltaire

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.