Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Philosophers - Page 20

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.

There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.

Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

The attributes of God tell us what He is and who He is.

Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or unbalanced, people's minds are running all the time. Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete. They are eaten alive by their egos. They think they see, but they are mistaken; all they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world. There is no clarity, no wisdom in that!

Knowledge is power.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

The fixed stars signify the angel in man. That is why man orients himself by them; and that is why women have no appreciation for the starry sky; because they have no sense of the angel in man.

Such is the power of imagination, that even a chimerical pleasure in expectation affects us more than a solid pleasure in possession.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

Knowing that I am different from the body, I need not neglect the body. It is a vehicle that I use to transact with the world. It is the temple which houses the Pure Self within.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity on self-examination.

George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

There can be no good character in civil government if there is none in the people. You cannot make a good omelet with bad eggs.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.

I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.

Logic is the art of thinking well: the mind, like the body, requires to be trained before it can use its powers in the most advantageous way.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

The sweetest of all sounds is that of the voice of the woman we love.

Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know', and thou shalt progress.

We cannot use our thoughts and feelings as a standard: only God’s Word is the test.

The success of an archery shot may bring food to the hunter's starving family, or may constitute a horrible murder. But these outcomes are irrelevant to the assessment of that shot as a hunter-archery shot, as an attempt to hit prey without running excessive risk of failure.

What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war.

The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth.

Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.

No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

As for you, my beloved friend, I loyally believe in your uniqueness; but whenever I try to tell to you wherein it consists, I helplessly describe only a type.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

Crave for a thing, you will get it. Renounce the craving, the object will follow you by itself.

And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.