Famous Quotes & Sayings

W. Somerset Maugham

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Wynn Bullock

If you stop searching, you stop living, because then you're dwelling in the past. If you're not reaching forward to any growth or future, you might as well be dead.

William Osler

Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.

William O. Douglas

Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ...

William O. Douglas

But our society - unlike most in the world - presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.

Zygmunt Bauman

Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.

Thomas Reid

We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

Thomas Reid

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

Thomas Reid

Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.

Robert McNamara

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.

Robert Greene

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

Robert B. Laughlin

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.

Robert Anton Wilson

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

Robert Anton Wilson

...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Richard M. Nixon

Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy.

Richard Rorty

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Richard Rorty

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

Richard Courant

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

Tullian Tchividjian

When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.

Tad Williams

Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.

Tadao Ando

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

Swami Vivekananda

According to this philosophy, each man consists of three parts - the body, the internal organ or the mind, and behind that, what is called the Atman, the Self.

Swami Vivekananda

Today the West is awakening to its wants; and the "true self of man and spirit" is the watchword of the advanced school of Western theologians. The student of Sanskrit philosophy knows where the wind is blowing from, but it matters not whence the power comes so longs as it brings new life.

Swami Vivekananda

Philosophy insists that there is a joy which is absolute, which never changes.

Swami Vivekananda

As to the so-called Hindu idolatry - first go and learn the forms they are going through, and where it is that the worshippers are really worshipping, whether in the temple, in the image, or in the temple of their own bodies. First know for certain what they are doing - which more than ninety per cent of the revilers are thoroughly ignorant of - and then it will explain itself in the light of the Vedantic philosophy.

Swami Vivekananda

Proselytism is tolerated by Hinduism. Any man, whether he be a Shudra or Chandala, can expound philosophy even to a Brahmin. The truth can be learnt from the lowest individual, no matter to what caste or creed he belongs.

Rumi

There's no need to travel anywhere. Journey within yourself.

Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

Tom Robbins

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

Stephen Schwartz

I have learned that human beings are not searching for philosophies, even though it may seem that way sometimes. We are searching for something we can trust. And when we find ourselves in the midst of change, the philosophies are like a broken crutch. They do not hold us up. What supports us is a force, an energy, a vortex of love that expresses through us as warmth, creativity, service, and compassion.

Stephen Fry

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

Stephen Fry

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

Stephen Fry

Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.