Quotes by Philosophers - Page 89

You forget your feet when the shoes are comfortable. You forget your waist when the belt is comfortable. Understanding forgets right and wrong when the mind is comfortable. There is no change in what is inside, no following what is outside, when the adjustment to events is comfortable. You begin with what is comfortable and never experience what is uncomfortable when you know the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.
Zhuangzi
The young... are full of hope and discontent... And the old are those who were once discontented, but who have successfully smothered that flame and have found security and comfort in various ways.
Krishnamurti
It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Umberto Eco
Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.
Aldous Huxley
There exists in man a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition,to the grave.
Thomas Paine
Those who do not succeed do not believe in their ability to exercise the potential power to forge beyond perceptions of limitations.
T.F. Hodge
Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James
Anyone who has ever achieved anything has been a steward of his potential.
Chris Matakas
there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The AristocratThe Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stayAt his little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by masteryThe starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself.O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stayAt the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word.
G.K. Chesterton
Don't look for the devil outside, look inside and exorcise yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The greatest modern error is not to proclaim that God died, but to believe that the devil has died.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.
Stanisław Lem
The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
G.K. Chesterton
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
Look upon good books; they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble: be you but true to yourself...and you shall need no other comfort nor counsel.
Francis Bacon
A friend who betrays you is an enemy.
Gift Gugu Mona
Faults are soon copied.
Horace
Virginity comes standard. A good head is earned.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us.
Aristotle
for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.
Plato
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.
Aristotle
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)
Voltaire
Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing.
Muriel Barbery
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.
G.K. Chesterton
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else
Cornelius Van Til
There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.
John M. Frame
Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.
Bertrand Russell
I have previously reduced the whole science of logic to two facts.The first is that our perceptions being every thing for us, we areperfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of whatever we actually feel.The second is that consequently none of our judgments, separatelytaken, can be erroneous: inasmuch as we see one idea in another it isactually there; but their falsity, when it takes place, is purely relativeto anterior judgments, which we permit to subsist; and it consists inthis, that we believe the idea in which we perceive a new element tobe the same as that we have always had under the same sign, when itis really different, since the new element which we actually see thereis incompatible with some of those which we have previously seen;so that to avoid contradiction we must either take away the former ornot admit the latter.
Antoine Destutt de Tracy
1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue.3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous.4. But virtue involves overcoming pains and dangers.5. Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain or be destroyed.6. A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought.7.For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is nonsuffering and indestructible.8. Therefore, God does not exist.
Douglas N. Walton
There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
Robert Nozick
Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments.
W.H. Newton-Smith
I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole’s 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'.
Ernest Nagel
Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.
Rudolf Carnap
Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
Hannah Arendt
It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an "illogical" world would look like.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are no logical contradictions in the Christian faith. If there were even one logical contradiction at the center of the Christian faith, the Christian faith would be necessarily false.
Ronald H. Nash
If you play games with the law of non-contradiction, then every time you open your mouth and say anything, you're cheating. Every time you make a choice in life you're cheating.
Ronald H. Nash
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, give it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.
Robert M. Pirsig
But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When somebody comes with a conclusion, then he looks through that conclusion and chooses only things which support his position.Logic is a prostitute.It can help anybody - for or against, it has no problem.
Osho
Causality is a pointless superstition. These days it would take more than one book to persuade anyone of that.
Arif Ahmed
Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth–that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. The reader is at liberty to think so or not as long as the proof is not set forth, or as long as he refrains from examining it. Just so, he can preserve, if he likes, his freedom of opinion in regard to the propositions of geometry; only, in that case, if he takes a fancy to read Euclid, he will do well to skip whatever he finds with A, B, C, etc., for, if he reads attentively that disagreeable matter, the freedom of his opinion about geometry may unhappily be lost forever.
Charles Sanders Peirce
It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, — ‘Aye,’ asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?’ And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.
Francis Bacon
It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.
Jerry A. Fodor
The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences.... Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences.... So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is false, she may be able to accomplish her goal without the use of inductive inferences.... When a scientist collects experimental data, her aim might be to show that a particular theory...is false. She will have to resort to inductive reasoning.... So Popper's attempt to show that science can get by without induction does not succeed.
Samir Okasha
One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.
Stanisław Lem
I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
Umberto Eco
In order that the concept of substance could originate--which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it--it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just-- had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in enforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
David Hume
[I]f God as a subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.
Ludwig Feuerbach
The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.
Bertrand Russell