A Quote by Wallace Stevens

Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

Wallace Stevens

Quote Topics

Clouds Speech

Quote Author

Wallace Stevens
American - Poet
October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955

The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.

Rebecca Goldstein

It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.

Glenn Greenwald

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

William Kittredge

If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.

Ann Coulter

When I look at the clouds over the Earth, and I know how high clouds are, I get a sense we are really, really far above those clouds. I wouldn't call it scary, but I am aware I am in space.

Scott Kelly

I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!

Charles Baudelaire

Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? ... The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.

Toni Morrison

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

Bertrand Russell

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

George Santayana

I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

James Agee

Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

David Benioff

'God put the rainbow in the clouds, not just in the sky'... It is wise to realize we already have rainbows in our clouds, or we wouldn't be here. If the rainbow is in the clouds, then in the worst of time, there is the possibility of seeing hope... We can say 'I can be a rainbow in the cloud for someone yet to be.' That may be our calling.