A Quote by Alphonse de Lamartine

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Quote Topics

Expression Genius Philosophy Rational

Quote Author

Alphonse de Lamartine
French - Poet
October 21, 1790 - February 28, 1869

Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.

Dale Jamieson

Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

Arthur Schopenhauer

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

There is the enormous corpus of Islamic law that is very rich. However, law is one rational exercise of reason. Philosophy is very different. Philosophy wants to try to understand everything. It is a better dialogue partner with faith than law.

Francis George

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

Otto Weininger

The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race. Everywhere and at all times, it has opposed the liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and intellectual development. It has denied the existence of facts, the tendency of which was to undermine its power. It has always been carrying fagots to the feet of Philosophy. It has erected the gallows for Genius. It has built the dungeon for Thinkers.

Robert Green Ingersoll

The very essence of political philosophy is the carving out of an ethical system - strictly, a subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the one rational discipline that demands the establishment of a rational set of value judgments; political ethics is that subset applying to matters of State.

Murray Rothbard

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Will Durant

Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.

Luce Irigaray

I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory

Martha Graham

We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state.

Bertrand Russell

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Karl Popper

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

Edward Bond

I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.