Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Etienne Gilson

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Etienne Gilson.

Last updated on December 20, 2024.

Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a Neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" (member) of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

French - Philosopher | June 13, 1884 - September 19, 1978

Source: Wikipedia

Let us ... quietly accept our times, with the firm conviction that just as much good can be done today as at any time in the past, provided only that we have the will and the way to do it.

Etienne Gilson

To minds tormented by the divine thirst, it is useless to offer the most certain knowledge of the laws of numbers and the arrangement of the universe

Etienne Gilson

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

Etienne Gilson

Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful: it is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind, and makes us want to perceive it again

Etienne Gilson

Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good and who enjoys them as beautiful. For all that which is, down to the humblest form of existence, exhibits the inseparable privileges of being, which are truth, goodness, and beauty.

Etienne Gilson

If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics.

Etienne Gilson

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Etienne Gilson

Why are there organized beings? Why is there something rather than nothing? Here again, I fully understand a scientist who refuses to ask it. He is welcome to tell me that the question does not make sense. Scientifically speaking, it does not. Metaphysically speaking, however, it does. Science can account for many things in the world; it may some day account for all that which the world of phenomena actually is. But why anything at all is, or exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even ask the question.

Etienne Gilson

Humans feel at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.

Etienne Gilson

Faith comes to intelligence as a light that overflows it with joy and inspires it with a certitude that does away with question.

Etienne Gilson