Philosophy quotes
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"A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals."
"Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it."
"During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege."
"Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind."
"I say me, knowing all the while it's not me."
"We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties."
"Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood."
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm."
"Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales."
"We live ruins amid ruins."
"A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands."
"The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life."
"If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries."
"No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy."
"Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought."
"The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as must include the oldest beliefs."
"Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena."
"Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence."
"Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse."
"Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor."
