Philosophy Literature Quotes & Sayings

Let the 'why not' philosophy be your life principle! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jigga, Kells, Not Guilty — R. Kelly

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming. — Paulo Freire

For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever — Edmund Burke

Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it. — Joshua Isard

In philosophy, the principles are more interesting than the examples. In literature, the examples are more interesting than the principles. — Mason Cooley

The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes. — Dejan Stojanovic

Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of religion among others, under the heading of 'intuitive dualism'. It is rather shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on 'the explanatory gap' are familiar with this empirical literature. — David Papineau

A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape. — Dejan Stojanovic

The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present. — Philip Kitcher

[Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy ... They lack an anchor for their real self. — Billy Graham

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful. — Arthur Schopenhauer

An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age. — William C. Brown

Only philosophy can go deep enough to show that literature goes still deeper than philosophy — Michel Serres

There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle. — Dejan Stojanovic

Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had looked to the West for her civilization, even to the extend of adopting French as a second language - or as a first for people of station and learning. The United States, recently cut loose politically from England, still drew heavily on the Old World for her art, literature, science and philosophy. Intellectuals from both nations flocked to Europe in search of eduction and aesthetic stimulation, and many became so enthralled with European civilization that they failed to return. In Russia as well as in the United States many an indignant patriot would rant about the need for serving European apron strings. — Perry D. Westbrook

Knowledge is justified belief. — Jerome Bruner

Do not look too far for you will see nothing. — Dejan Stojanovic

Don't look up to people, don't be someone's following.
Now a days everything you see is just a lie,
Instead be the person you want to follow. — Akash Lakhotia

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it. — Donald Miller

The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason. In — Steven Pressfield

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. — Stephen Fry

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. — Denis Diderot

The game itself is bigger than the winning. — Dejan Stojanovic

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. — James Hillman

A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. — Leland Ryken

Nick watched her intently as he tried to sort through the anarchy of his thoughts. His usual appetite had vanished after their walk this morning. He had not eaten breakfast ... had not done anything, really, except to wander around the estate in a sort of daze that appalled him. He knew himself to be a callous man, one with no honor, and no means of quelling his own brutish instincts. So much of his life had been occupied with basic survival that he had never been free to follow higher pursuits. He had little acquaintance with literature or history, and his mathematical abilities were limited to matters of money and betting odds. Philosophy, to him, was a handful of cynical principles learned through experience with the worst of humanity. By now, nothing could surprise or intimidate him. He didn't fear loss, pain, or even death.
But with a few words and one awkward, innocent kiss, Charlotte Howard had devastated him. — Lisa Kleypas

Let us being again. To take some examples: why should "literature" still designate that which already breaks away from literature - away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name - or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can "what has always been conceived and signified under that name" be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a "book," or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a "philosophical discourse"? — Jacques Derrida

Philosophy by showing - including philosophy in literature - does truly valuable work in leading us to new perspectives from which our arguments can then begin. It does so by introducing new synthetic complexes, which we then reflect on from various points of view. When the complexes survive and grow, that initial showing has been philosophically decisive. — Philip Kitcher

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship. — Bertrand Russell

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system. — Jules Michelet

If you want to consume the cream of Christ's philosophy, then don't read the Bible, read Tolstoy. — Abhijit Naskar

Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence. — Dejan Stojanovic

Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect? — Paul Kalanithi

Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties. — Terry Eagleton

Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature. — Morris Raphael Cohen

We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil. — Caroline Alexander

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge. — Dejan Stojanovic

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display. — Nadeem Aslam

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came. — Raymond Carver

If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses. — Dejan Stojanovic

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. — David Foster Wallace

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time. — Dejan Stojanovic

We need knew knights, but without swords. — Dejan Stojanovic

Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy is a major contribution to art therapy literature and practice. Laury Rappaport introduces a contemplative method and philosophy grounded in the body's felt-sense of experience and its innate and largely unrecognized wisdom. This intellectually provocative, yet thoroughly practical text, establishes Rappaport as an emergent leader in the art therapy world and author of a book that every student and art therapist must read in order to appreciate the depth and breadth of our discipline. — Shaun McNiff

The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct. — John Lancaster Spalding

Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end. — Dejan Stojanovic

Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing — Dejan Stojanovic

The wisdom of our ancestors is immortal. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler. — Gustavo Dudamel

Hope without love is hopeless. — Dejan Stojanovic

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies. — Dejan Stojanovic

Don't pay attention to those who offer too much. — Dejan Stojanovic

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art. — Dejan Stojanovic

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association — William James

During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; — Will Durant

Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute. — Dejan Stojanovic

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits. — Jerome Bruner

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. — Anthony Burgess

History must be documented; every moment is a sacred history. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We must become just be doing just acts. — Aristotle.

The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing. — Luc Ferry

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly. — Jerome K. Jerome

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture. — Edith Wharton

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting. — Dejan Stojanovic

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,

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite. — Barbara Cassin

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop. — Lin Yutang

Nothing is working. Nothing in my life is working. Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote - dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper's boot stomps. I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn't dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn't dream of becoming a giant - I wasn't that delusional or arrogant - but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget. I could have been a midget. All our dreams of glory are but manure in the end. — Rabih Alameddine

In the essence of truth lies deceit. — Dejan Stojanovic

Absolute equals nothingness. — Dejan Stojanovic

If you are good, they say you are weak. — Dejan Stojanovic

I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case. — Philip Kitcher

It is no easy task to be good. — Aristotle.

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit. — Dejan Stojanovic

Your life will be colourful if you just add colours to your life! It is your own decisions that will determine to have a miserable or a marvellous life! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life. — Richard Ford

Critical discussions of Western colonialism and imperialism and of what the term postcolonialism could mean, require, and enable first became acceptable in literature and cultural studies departments in the United States some three decades ago. Yet it has been much harder to create such discussions of sciences and technologies. Especially resistant are those departments where the West's scientific rationality and technical expertise have long been lovingly explained and "served up" for use in corporate and nationalist policies: sociology, philosophy, economics, and international relations, as well as the natural sciences themselves. — Sandra G. Harding

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert? — Dejan Stojanovic

Teaching others, he corrected himself. — Dejan Stojanovic

If I have nothing but a room full of books, it is enough for me to survive life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

He thought others were small; that was his greatness. — Dejan Stojanovic

In the lie of truth lies the truth. — Dejan Stojanovic

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare? — Dejan Stojanovic

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought. — Robert Darnton

In the end, we learn about the most basic philosophical questions - like "How to live?" - from a broad mixture of sources, including literature and philosophy, history and anthropology. These sources can guide our reflections on our own experiences, as we explore and reconsider. Mann contributed to such explorations in a distinctive way, and I hope my book brings that out. — Philip Kitcher

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards. — Dejan Stojanovic

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments. — Isaac Asimov

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn't live off fame, but rather deeds. — Dejan Stojanovic

Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses:
1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.
2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.
3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.
4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.
5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.
8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. — Arthur Conan Doyle

My grandma, Mrs Grace Ayorkor Acquah said 'Educating the child is everybody's business. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me. — Tom McCarthy

God is busy and has no time for you. — Dejan Stojanovic

The universe is God's son. — Dejan Stojanovic

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can! — J.R.R. Tolkien