PHILOSOPHY QUOTES III
quotations about philosophy
For Hume, skepticism about metaphysical subjects ended in an indolence born of seclusion. The only solution was to transfer the skeptical impulse in philosophy from the solitude of the study to the wider social world. Under these circumstances, skepticism fostered equanimity rather than discontent. In society, the true skeptic acknowledged the value of common sense without submitting slavishly to its whims. Skepticism in this context was profitable and enabling; it criticized without destroying the conditions of criticism, which depended on the existence of society and government. The positive results of criticism could be seen in society, politics, and morals. Philosophy could expose damaging ideas in ethics, unsocial attitudes in religion, and dangerous postures in politics.
RICHARD BOURKE
"Hume's Call to Action", The Nation, April 20, 2016
Any philosophy that can fit into a nutshell belongs there.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS
Egeria: or Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods and Wayside
Nor may a philosopher, any more than a poet, be a mere link in a chain: he must be a staple firmly and deeply fixt in the adamantine walls of Truth. If he rightly deserves the name, his mind must be impregnated with some of the primordial ideas, of life and being, man and nature, fate and freedom, order and law, thought and will, power and God. He may have received them from others; but he must receive them as seeds: they must teem and germinate within him, and mingle with the essence of his spirit, and must shape themselves into a new original growth. He who merely takes a string of propositions from former writers, and busies himself in drawing fresh inferences from them, may be a skilful logician or psychologer, but has no claim to the high title of a philosopher.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold it, and how it affects what you do.
COLIN NYATHI
"The power of compound effort", NewsDay, April 27, 2016
A mind rightly instituted in the school of philosophy, acquires at once the stability of the oak and the flexibility of the osier.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Citizen of the World
The sole function of philosophy is to lead us to happiness by way of the shortest possible route.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
When philosophy has gone as far as she is able, she arrives at almightiness, and in that labyrinth is lost; where, not knowing the way, she goes on by guess, and cannot tell whether she is right or wrong.... She runs into Omnipotency; and, like a petty river, is swallowed in that boundless main.
OWEN FELLTHAM
Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political
Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?" -- A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised, careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
ERNEST GELLNER
Words and Things
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy
Philosophy is reason with the eyes of the soul.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS
Egeria: or Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods and Wayside
It is unfortunately very difficult to describe the nature of philosophy in a small compass; the only satisfaction that an author can draw from the attempt to do so lies in the knowledge that an answer to the question "What is philosophy?" is apt to seem persuasive only to the extent that it is brief. The more one ponders over the qualifications that any reasoned answer must contain, the more one is driven to the conclusion that this question is itself one of the principal subjects of philosophical thinking.
ROGER SCRUTON
Short History of Modern Philosophy
We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.
ROBERT FULGHUM
"Robert Fulghum: Philosopher King", January Magazine
Philosophy should quicken life, not deaden it.
SUSAN GLASPELL
Little Masks
In every philosophical discussion, conclusions turn on intuitions about what's right or wrong, plausible or implausible, something one would or would not say. Philosophy needs psychological experiments to understand how we're arriving at our conclusions.
JOSHUA GREENE
"Philosophers are using science and data points to test theories of morality", Quartz, March 28, 2016
Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.
MICHAEL HARDT & ANTONIO NEGRI
Empire
Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Occasions
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire