Quotes by Authors - Page 5013

Understanding how little we know is crucial to gaining knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
Logical positivism is philosophy from the neck up.
Marty Rubin
When you separate thought from life, you get philosophy.
Marty Rubin
The search for first causes is the ultimate wild goose chase.
Marty Rubin
Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom, which is the state of perpetual wonder.
Neel Burton
We use Halloween to scare the kids and bankers to scare the adults.
Anthony T.Hincks
It's when you sit alone,Or lay in your bed, That we will be watching,Waiting,Until you get scared.Then we will come,A scratch and a chill,For you will feel goosebumps,Look at the windowsill!Did you see a face?Looking in at you,You know that you did,Beware...you'll turn blue.Is that the wind,Howling at the moon,Or is it a werewolf,That's coming for you?So sit in your chair,Or lay in your bed,Because we''ll be there,And you'll be dead!
Anthony T.Hincks
God's everywhere.So remember when you go to the toilet not to laugh.
Anthony T.Hincks
Depression! It really gets you down.
Anthony T.Hincks
You discuss philosophy about what you read but never really live the wisdom.
Dragos Bratasanu
It's when you tame your nightmares, that your dreams will willingly enter the corral.
Anthony T.Hincks
Colors are what trick the mind and our imaginations into buying things.
Anthony T.Hincks
My one and only goal is to unite the world.
Anthony T.Hincks
For Christians . . . an unreflective faith is not possible if we take seriously the injunction to love God with the mind as well as the heart and soul.
Delwin Brown
Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.
Juli Zeh
Der Pragmatismus ersetzt uns alles, was früher die großen Ideen, die Ideologien und Religionen, der Glaube an Friede, Menschenrechte und Demokratie zu bieten hatten. Der Pragmatismus hält uns davon ab, zu Verbrechern zu werden, oder er macht uns zu solchen, wenn es nötig ist. Er legitimiert das Bestehen von Rechtssystem, Familie und Arbeit, er lässt uns nett sein und empfiehlt, sich ein angenehmes Äußeres zu erwerben. Nachdem wir uns aller Zwänge nach und nach erledigt haben, sorgt ein einziger Betreuer für uns: Pragmatismus.
Juli Zeh
There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies.
James Runcie
Kein Philosoph würde ein dickes Buch schreiben, wenn er im Vornherein wüsste, auf welche Weise er später zitiert werden wird.
Juli Zeh
When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.
Brock Clarke
A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.
Joel Salatin
To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.
Stuart Sutherland
Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.
Robert Zaretsky
You’re still a little shy, I see, the wizard noted. I think if you ignore evil, my friend, it tends to grow stronger. (Quinhelm, the wizard - from BRIGGEN)
Ann B. Keller
- Escute mais isso. Por outro lado, forças jovens, frescas, sucumbem em vão por falta de apoio, e isso aos milhares, e isso em toda parte! Cem, mil boas ações e iniciativas que poderiam ser implementadas e reparadas com o dinheiro da velha, destinado a um mosteiro! Centenas, talvez milhares de existências encaminhadas; dezenas de famílias salvas da miséria, da desagregação, da morte, da depravação, das doenças venéreas - e tudo isso com o dinheiro dela. Mate-a e tome-lhe o dinheiro, para com sua ajuda dedicar-se depois a servir toda a humanidade e a uma causa comum: o que você acha, esse crime ínfimo não seria atenuado por milhares de boas ações? Por uma vida - milhares de vidas salvas do apodrecimento e da degeneração. Uma morte e cem vidas em troca - ora, isso é uma questão de aritimética.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Not a good book. It attempts to take a complex subject and make it assessable to the layman with cartoons, and in this effort it fails. Moreover, the authors often take biased stances, and while I agree with them for the most part it nonetheless detracts from any scholarly offerings in which they wish to partake.
Richard Appignanesi
Cada época, cada cultura, cada costume e tradição tem seu próprio estilo, tem sua delicadeza e sua severidade, suas belezas e crueldades, aceitam certos sofrimentos como naturais, sofrem pacientemente certas desgraças. O verdadeiro sofrimento, o verdadeiro inferno da vida humana reside ali onde se chocam duas culturas ou duas religiões. Um homem da antiguidade, que tivesse de viver na Idade Média, haveria de sentir-se tão afogado quanto um selvagem se sentiria em nossa civilização. Há momentos em que toda uma geração cai entre dois estilos de vida, e toda evidência, toda moral, toda salvação e inocência ficam perdidos para ela. Naturalmente isso não nos atinge da mesma maneira.
Hermann Hesse
What about you, Snipes?" Dunbar asked. "You think there to be mountain lions up here or is it just folks' imaginings?"Snipes pondered the question a few moments before speaking.They's many a man of science would claim there aint because you got no irredeemable evidence like panther scat or fur or tooth or tail. In other words, some part of the animal in questions. Or better yet having the actual critter itself, the whole think kit and caboodle head to tail, which all your men of science argue is the best proof of all a thing exists, whether it be a panther, or a bird, or even a dinosaur."To put it another way, if you was to stub your toe and tell the man of science what happened he'd not believe a word of it less he could see how it'd stoved up or was bleeding. But your philosophers and theologians and such say there’s things in the world that’s every bit as real even though you can’t see them.”Like what?” Dunbar asked.Well,” Snipes said. “They’s love, that’s one. And courage. You can’t see neither of them, but they’re real. And air, of course. That’s one of your most important examples. You wouldn’t be alive a minute if there wasn’t air, but nobody’s ever seen a single speck of it.”… “All I’m saying is there is a lot more to this old world than meets the eye.”… “And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when its all around you sure enough know it.” (Serena, 65-66)
Ron Rash
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
Richard Holbrooke
Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!
John Allen Paulos
In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)
Susan Neiman
Is beauty enhanced or adulterated by utility?
Sena Jeter Naslund
If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond.
David Guterson
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.
Bronowski
Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.
Harry G. Frankfurt
The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
O principal é não mentir. Quem mente para si mesmo e dá ouvido à sua própria mentira chega a tal extremo que não consegue ver nenhuma verdade em si ou naqueles que o rodeiam e, por conseguinte, perde completamente o respeito por si e pelos outros. (...) Quem mente a si próprio pode ser o primeiro a ofender-se. Às vezes, é tão agradável uma pessoa se ofender, não é verdade? O indivíduo sabe que ninguém o injuriou, que tudo não passa de simples invenção, que ele próprio mentiu e exagerou apenas para criar um quadro, para fazer de um grão uma montanha - sabe tudo e, no entanto, se ofende. Ofende-se a ponto se sentir prazer na ofensa e, desse modo, atinge o verdadeiro ódio...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.
Susan Blackmore
[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots.
Stephan Delbos
The most important thing I gained from my travels was the knowledge that one could achieve anything with determination and an ounce of luck.
Stefan Waydenfeld
you got a sad story, ruth,' mimba said. 'but not sad-sad. you here with me and cato and all us together now. you have a happy-sad story. best you can get in this life is happy-sad. but you always gotta remember your own mama that birthed you. even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud. you always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.
Anita Diamant
A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one's own, whether it be "conservative," " non-violent," or "spiritual," is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of that Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.
Seraphim Rose
The road ahead is long and there will be many setbacks. Success is not assured… but the price of failure has never been this high.
Charles Lee Lesher
Truth may start out timid, but it finishes bold.
T.J. Forrester
Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
Virginia Woolf
Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.
Christof Koch
It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory.
Seraphim Rose
Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.
C.S. Lewis
A truth is not necessary, because we negatively are not able to conceive the actual existence of the opposite thereof;but a truth is necessary when we positively are able to apprehend that the negation thereof includes an inevitable contradiction. It is not that that we can see how the opposite comes to be true, but it is that the opposite can not possibly be true.
Robert Lewis Dabney
What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.
Seraphim Rose
Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.
Alexander McCall Smith
Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something."The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action."Olivier frowned. "So?""Dear boy, I must tell you a secret.""What?""I do believe it is wrong.
Iain Pears
Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.
Iain Pears
Mortals are odd creatures in that sense—flawed yet hopeful. One can study them through millennia and still get nowhere near full understanding of their nature.
Hayden Thorne
If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.
Neal Stephenson
Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit.
Aberjhani
While it was well within their powers to toy around with mortals like hapless puppets, deeper human workings remained elusive to them. The heart, the soul, the very foundation of man’s nature—those were mysteries to the gods, for all their manipulations.
Hayden Thorne
Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.
Alain de Botton
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway
If he was not exactly a Spartan, he was, you might say, spartanatical. Things happened to you; they were good,or they were bad - and that was the truth about everything.
A.E. Coppard
I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began."And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all.""I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly."Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin.
Iain Pears