Top 1200 Greek Philosopher Quotes & Sayings

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

Among the conservative Greek opinion there would be no regrets that Alexander the Greek leader was invading the barbarians.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

I was spending most of my summers in Greece when I was a little girl, and at boarding school my first room-mate was Greek, so I guess I kind of had that Greek destiny.

I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.

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

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

I've got my huge Greek family. I mean, I don't know how many cousins I have - I can't even keep track. There are just so many of us, and we love all Greek food - we have Greek night every Sunday night.

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

I like the idea of being a postmodern moral philosopher - or perhaps a perverse moral philosopher.

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.

It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival.

That period of history has always fascinated me - Greek history, Greek mythology.

In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!

The Greek people do not want to exit the euro, and I believe the Greek people already have shown that they have made major sacrifices to stay within the Eurozone.

I'm Greek-American, and I come from an immigrant-type background, and Greek-American parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer. Because that's how you make money, and it's very respectable.

I think the Greek people, although it is difficult and challenging and the politics of it I know are not good, should appreciate the fact that in this global economy, the Greek economy was going to have to go through some structural reforms.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.

Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.

And Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, expressly writes: 'For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek.'

.. the word ecology, coined by the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (initially as oecology) in 1866. derives from the Greek oikos, "referring originally to the family household and its daily operations and maintenance." The term ecology is therefore intended to refer to the study of the conditions of existence that pertain to, and the interactions between, all the entities that make up our larger, cosmic household here upon earth.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

I didn't have a big fat Greek wedding, but I have a lot of fat Greek friends.

Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.

All the superhero stuff is Greek myths and Greek gods, wearing tights and capes. That's what they are. That's what I gravitate towards.

The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy.

To defer anything to the Greek Calends is to defer it sine die. There were no calends in the Greek months. The Romans used to pay rents, taxes, bills, etc., on the calends, and to defer paying them to the “Greek Calends” was virtually to repudiate them. (See NEVER.)

Darian is a Greek name, and my grandson is definitely going to be a Greek God, just like his grandfather.

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

I've always argued that it is just as desirable, just as possible, to have philosopher plumbers as philosopher kings.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.

As Kant says, the contribution of any common laborer would be greater than that of the greatest philosopher unless the philosopher makes some contribution to establishing the rights of humanity.

Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care.

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

Everyone asks me why someone Turkish is making Greek yogurt. In Greece, it is not called 'Greek yogurt.' Everywhere in the world it is called 'strained yogurt.' But because it was introduced in this country by a Greek company, they called it 'Greek yogurt.'

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.

A Greek exit from the E.U. and the euro would mean the Greek economy would be difficult to sustain.

The Greek makes the distinction between petros and petra simply because it is trying to preserve the pun, and in Greek the feminine petra could not very well serve as a masculine name.

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

A philosopher may try to prove the truth of something he believed before he was a philosopher, but even if he succeeds, his belief never regain the untroubled character, and the settled place in his mind, which it had at first.

Who lives as a citizen, may write as a philosopher - but write as a philosopher, it is to teach materialism!

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.

The difference between a poet and a philosopher is that the poet sees logically and describes basically the beauty whereas the philosopher defines the basics and shows the beauty of logics.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

I'm extremely into Greek Mythology and know almost everything about the classic Greek myths.

How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy.