A Quote by Henry Adams

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams

Quote Topics

Answers Philosophy Problems Unintelligible

Quote Author

Henry Adams
American - Historian
February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

Henry Adams

I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete - that it takes an awful lot of philosophy - philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second - even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences.

Rebecca Goldstein

Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

Rebecca Goldstein

In my reading of philosophy, I saw that there were innumerable problems that nobody was giving answers for. the Bible, it struck me, dealt with man's problems in a sweeping, all-encompassing thrust.

Francis Schaeffer

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

Simone Weil

Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.

Joan Didion

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.

James A. Michener

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.

Will Eisner

The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

Wendell Berry

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Reinhold Niebuhr

There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

Alec Douglas-Home

For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

Reinhold Niebuhr

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

Franz Grillparzer

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This 'outgrowing', as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.

Carl Jung

A Quote by Henry Adams

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors