Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Philosophers - Page 4

Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.

By doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.

The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Characters in Hollywood movies encounter a lot of car chases. Characters in novels rarely wash their hands or do their laundry. And in the work of moral psychologists, people deliberate and reflect a lot. They deliberate, one sometimes feels, whenever they perform an action, and certainly whenever they act for good reasons.

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

Curiosity begins as an act of tearing to pieces or analysis.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

All our relationships are person-to-person. They involve people seeing, hearing, touching, and speaking to each other; they involve sharing goods; and they involve moral values like generosity and compassion.

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.

A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy.

Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

After the 9/11 incidents, Islam has become a big question mark among westerners, especially Americans. The mass media constantly raise the issue of relationship between Islam and terrorism.

Do not be proud of wealth, people, relations and friends, or youth. All these are snatched by time in the blink of an eye. Giving up this illusory world, know and attain the Supreme.

I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.

An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.

O thou Sun, send me as far over the earth as is my pleasure and thine, and may I make the acquaintance of good men, but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me.

The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.

The world, like a dream full of attachments and aversions seems real until the awakening.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

You shouldn't say 'animals' to distinguish between humans and non-humans. We are all animals.

In that instant when I had seen... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

The self is not a thing, but a process.

Call it a case of observer bias on my part, but Humanist Paganism seems to be an emerging option for those who want to be part of the Pagan community, but who want to be a little more intellectual about their practices, and they really don't care about the 'woo' anymore.

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.

God is one, greatest of gods and men, not like mortals in body or thought.

Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the 'causal completeness of physics' - every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be physical things.

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

The pinafore of the child will be more than a match for the frock of the bishop and the surplice of the priest.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.

Ethan Allen was convinced that every planet out there has its own intelligent extraterrestrials. And this, as you can imagine, is a radical, inspiring, but very unsettling, idea.

For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.