Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Philosophers - Page 3

Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work.

In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ's Lordship over all of life.

Worry is spiritual short sight. Its cure is intelligent faith.

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

Diogenes lighted a candle in the daytime, and went round saying, "I am looking for a man.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.

Men are guided less by conscience than by glory; and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation.

Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.

There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent, Of everything you think, And of everything you do, Is for yourself - And there isn’t one.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word 'understanding.'

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

A man must fortify himself and understand that a wise man who yields to laziness or anger or passion or love of drink, or who commits any other action prompted by impulse and inopportune, will probably find his fault condoned; but if he stoops to greed, he will not be pardoned, but render himself odious as a combination of all vices at once.

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.

The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.

It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.

Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

I pity the babies whose mothers are busy texting trivialities instead of playing with their children; I pity the children who are tethered to their cell phones instead of playing ball; I pity the adolescents who are wasting their best years holding one of those artefacts instead of the hand of another young person.

I realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.

Every failure is a step to success.

I believe it is impossible to be sure of anything.

If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

When you stop comparing what is right here and now with what you wish were, you can begin to enjoy what is.

I do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines.

We change the world not by what we say or do, but as a consequence of what we have become.

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

The efficiency of God may be understood as either creation or providence.

Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.

India Conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.