"The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them-from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default."
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Philosophy
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Philosophy quotes (page 56 of 266)
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"It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary."
"Just as man's physical existence was liberated when he grasped that 'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed', so his consciousness will be liberated when grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed - that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty."
"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System."
"It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct."
"Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought."
"The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others."
"Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'."
"The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments."
"A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates."
"There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life."
"I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die."
"Nothing is perfect on the human stage."
"Those who hope to avoid all failure and misfortune are trying to live in a fairyland; wise people realistically accept failures as a part of life and build philosophies to meet them and make the best of them."
"I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity."
"As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying."
"Never judge a philosophy by its abuse."
"Poetry is devil's wine."
"Spirituality is based on development of character and philosophy."
"The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again."