Top 1200 French Philosopher Quotes & Sayings - Page 9

Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.

What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance?

Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain, so I spare you the inside view of my heart.

Strange bent over these things, with a concentration to rival Minervois's own, questioning, criticizing and proposing. Strange and the two engravers spoke French to each other. To Strange's surprize Childermass understood perfectly and even addressed one or twoquestions to Minervois in his own language. Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

I've done many, many French movies and many, many English movies. I think it frees something when you don't talk in your mother language, but I also think you withdraw something as well. I'm a French actress, and sometimes I speak in English-speaking roles. For me, being an actress was always being a traveler. It goes together.

Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?

The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.

When African-Americans come to France, the French show them more consideration than they would show an African or a Black Caribbean. When African-Americans come to France, the French people are like, 'Oh, wow. Oh my God.' But if it's an African, they're like, 'Whatever.' It's all because of the past, because of our history.

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

By his provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to the sum of happiness as the gravest philosopher.

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher's stone.

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place.

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat.

The most important quote about poetry and politics that I know is from a different situationist, Guy Debord. He was locked in a debate with the French Surrealists, many of whom by the 40s and 50s were part of the French communist party apparatus. Many Surrealists eventually argued for instrumentalizing art for political ends. Debord countered, "I don't want to put poetry in the service of revolution. I want to put revolution in the service of poetry".

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse. Untrammeled reasoning is the indulgence of the philosopher, of the dreamer of sweet dreams.

If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this earth.

It is decidedly not true that "nice guys finish last," as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

whoever is so stupid as to imagine God to be either masculine or feminine openly shows that he is as bad a philosopher as a theologian.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

All are sure in their days except the most wise ... He is the wisest philosopher who holds his theory with some doubt.

The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.

Bertrand Russell started off as a mathematician and then degenerated into a philosopher and finally into a humanist; he went downhill rapidly!

A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

A couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance.

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.

One trait in the philosopher's character we can assume is his love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.

I also dreamt about finally meeting the leftist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He is a great role model for me.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

I am not a philosopher, only frustrated by the development of the world we live in - and too stupid to keep my mouth shut when I see injustice.

It may be a blessing in disguise...Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. Haitians were originally under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

There was never a choice to sing in English or French, that's the thing. We started a band and sang right away in English. You reproduce the thing you like, and most of the bands we liked were coming from England or the U.S. We also came to cherish the fact that there was no one in France singing in English -we were so happy Phoenix to be the first. Even if we are traitors to France, our country, which I'll never understand, because we talk about things that are very French.

I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

Aristotle wore many rings and expensive clothes. ... Plato found this off-putting and unsuited for a philosopher.

REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

That great philosopher anonymous once said, never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.

I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerableconcessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.

The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

When I wrote my first album, I was reading Joseph Campbell - he's this philosopher who writes about mythology. That inspired the title, 'No Mythologies to Follow.'

The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.

I'm extremely close to my mother. She's always meant a lot to me and has held the place of friend, philosopher and guide in my life.