Quotes by Philosophers - Page 25

We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.
Phillip Cary
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
distringit librorum multitudo (the abundance of books is distraction)
Seneca
Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
Thomas Paine
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1.tHomer – Iliad, Odyssey2.tThe Old Testament3.tAeschylus – Tragedies4.tSophocles – Tragedies5.tHerodotus – Histories6.tEuripides – Tragedies7.tThucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War8.tHippocrates – Medical Writings9.tAristophanes – Comedies10.tPlato – Dialogues11.tAristotle – Works12.tEpicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13.tEuclid – Elements14.tArchimedes – Works15.tApollonius of Perga – Conic Sections16.tCicero – Works17.tLucretius – On the Nature of Things18.tVirgil – Works19.tHorace – Works20.tLivy – History of Rome21.tOvid – Works22.tPlutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia23.tTacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24.tNicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic25.tEpictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion26.tPtolemy – Almagest27.tLucian – Works28.tMarcus Aurelius – Meditations29.tGalen – On the Natural Faculties30.tThe New Testament31.tPlotinus – The Enneads32.tSt. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33.tThe Song of Roland34.tThe Nibelungenlied35.tThe Saga of Burnt Njál36.tSt. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica37.tDante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38.tGeoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39.tLeonardo da Vinci – Notebooks40.tNiccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41.tDesiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly42.tNicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43.tThomas More – Utopia44.tMartin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises45.tFrançois Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel46.tJohn Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion47.tMichel de Montaigne – Essays48.tWilliam Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49.tMiguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote50.tEdmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51.tFrancis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52.tWilliam Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays53.tGalileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54.tJohannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55.tWilliam Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56.tThomas Hobbes – Leviathan57.tRené Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58.tJohn Milton – Works59.tMolière – Comedies60.tBlaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61.tChristiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light62.tBenedict de Spinoza – Ethics63.tJohn Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64.tJean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies65.tIsaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66.tGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67.tDaniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe68.tJonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69.tWilliam Congreve – The Way of the World70.tGeorge Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge71.tAlexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72.tCharles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73.tVoltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74.tHenry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75.tSamuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
Mortimer J. Adler
We live for books.
Umberto Eco
Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.
Jean-François Lyotard
Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.
Max Weber
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.
Alfred Korzybski
In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.
Noam Chomsky
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation al
William A. Dembski
The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium.
Stephen C. Meyer
To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted.
William A. Dembski
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
Bertrand Russell
To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.
Peter Singer
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.
Criss Jami
The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.
Criss Jami
Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.
Criss Jami
The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.
Gian-Carlo Rota
I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.
Criss Jami
We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.
Norbert Wiener
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
Henry David Thoreau
Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare it is the pleasure even of kings.
Blaise Pascal
Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.
Max Weber
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.
Noam Chomsky
For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.
Criss Jami
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation al
William A. Dembski
The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.
Anaximander
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
Bertrand Russell
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.
Criss Jami
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.
Criss Jami
Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.
Criss Jami
I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.
Criss Jami
If I were to vote, I would intentionally vote for the goofiest candidate. It is my theory that when the people can outwit the leader, the more respected their voices will be.
Criss Jami
We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.
Norbert Wiener
The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Henry David Thoreau
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
Erich Fromm
Ensure that your fame doesn't bring you shame.
Gift Gugu Mona
This life is not perfect, live it to the full, it's all we have
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Thomas Carlyle
When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.
Criss Jami
It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.
Criss Jami
This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.
Robert M. Pirsig
When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.
Robert M. Pirsig
(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
Assuming that all ‘unschooled’ people to lack education is akin to assuming that a salary is the only means to make money, or, that a vagina or a penis is the only source of an orgasm.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.
William James
Freedom of speech is unnecessary if the people to whom it is granted do not think for themselves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Augustine of Hippo
It is easier for one to take risks and to chase his dreams with a mindset that he has nothing to lose. In this lies the immense passion, the great advantage of avoiding a materialistic, pleasure-filled way of life.
Criss Jami