Famous Quotes

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.

~ George Lakoff

His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive, not intellectual; it can't be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can't be criticized as temperament, because temperament can't be criticized.

~ Álvaro De Campos

If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

~ David Starr Jordan

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro’s work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It’s an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.

~ Álvaro De Campos

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

~ Sun Tzu

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.

~ Sam Harris

It is never ridicule, but a compliment, that knocks a philosopher off his feet. He is already positioned for every possible counter-attack, counter-argument, and retort...only to find a big bear hug coming his way.

~ Criss Jami

The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.

~ Criss Jami

As far as I am concerned, philosophic questioning is just as likely to make you confused and depressed as it is to improve your condition.

~ Christopher Paolini

You will never know how high you can climb until you reach the top.

~ K.l. Toth

We are the sum total of the decisions we have made.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

That’s the thing about love It can take you up to the mountaintop and can drop you And the impact will either kill you or make you a new person

~ Kehinde Sonola

The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.

~ Aysha Taryam

Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says:... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

~ Felix Alba-Juez

Instinct is a makeshift, an admission of helplessness before the problem of reality.

~ Leo Frobenius

If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?

~ Felix Alba-Juez

Democracy should always be viewed with a philosophical perspective rather than a political one, because after all democracy was born to a philosopher and murdered by a politician.

~ Aysha Taryam

Teaching the layperson (divulgare) is not distorting (tergiversare) the subject, but educating the public; and it is our duty as scientists to educate without distorting the essence of the scientific knowledge attained by humanity. The future of our society depends upon this premise.

~ Felix Alba-Juez

‎...θα πρέπει να αντιληφθείς, αγαπητή Τερέζα, ότι τα αντικείμενα δεν έχουν, κατά την άποψη μας, άλλη αξία από εκείνη που τους δίνει η φαντασία μας

~ Marquis De Sade

I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.

~ Jesus Zamora Bonilla

In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.

~ Aysha Taryam

Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole.

~ W. Norris Clarke

Sin is a gravitation.

~ Victor Hugo

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal.

~ Felix Alba-Juez

Δύο υπερβολές : ν' αποκλείουμε το Λόγο, και να μη δεχόμαστε παρά μόνο το Λόγο.

~ Blaise Pascal

You can't always be right, but you can be wrong a lot less

~ Benny Bellamacina

Il pessimismo radicale sconfina nell'ottimismo.

~ Guido Morselli

Тогава си счел всички земни придобивки за нищо. И сега недей да милееш за нищо. Имай готовност, като захвърлиш всичко, да останеш гол.

~ Феофан Затворник

#quote In the harshest conditions is when we know better the people around us. En las condiciones más duras es cuando conocemos mejor a las personas que nos rodean.

~ Juan Luis Ortiz Hidalgo

Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

~ Alan W. Watts

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

~ Stephen Hawking

I only seem negative to the fortunate. That's because I show the less fortunate that they aren't less fortunate after all.

~ Criss Jami

I have a sickness doctors can't cure,Inexorably pulling me to the well of my destruction,Consented to be a sacrifice, killed for her love,Eager, like the drunk gulping wine mixed with poison,Shameless were those my nights,Yet my soul loved them beyond all passion.

~ Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

~ Emil M. Cioran

No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.

~ John Paul Ii

Formation may be the best name for what happens in a circle of trust, because the word refers, historically, to soul work done in community. But a quick disclaimer is in order, since formation sometimes means a process quite contrary to the one described in this book----a process in which the pressure of orthodox doctrine, sacred text, and institutional authority is applied to the misshapen soul in order to conform it to the shape dictated by some theology. This approach is rooted in the idea that we are born with souls deformed by sin, and our situation is hopeless until the authorities form us properly. But all of that is turned upside down by the principles of a circle of trust: I applaud the theologian who said that the idea of humans being born alienated from the Creator would seem an abominable concept. Here formation flows from the belief that we are born with souls in perfect form. As time goes on, we subject to powers of deformation, from within as well as without, that twist us into shapes alien to the shape of the soul. But the soul never loses its original form and never stops calling us back to our birhtright integrity.

~ Parker J. Palmer

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

~ Albert Camus