What Is Philosopher Quotes & Sayings

All of Dostoevsky's heroes question themselves as to the meaning of life. In this they are modern: they do not fear ridicule. What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral programs and the former on metaphysical programs. In Dostoevsky's novels the question is propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were satisfied with this inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the consequences that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man's life, and in this regard he is an artist. — Albert Camus

So, whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you're trying to force something that won't fit under the circumstances. That's a destructive waste of time. And if that isn't enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won't get anywhere in the long run ... You know what the philosopher Aldous Huxley said? He said 'Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. — Tony Vigorito

My faith is with technology and with psychedelics. Politics aren't going to take us much further. We're awakening as a planet to the very good news that all ideology is parochial and culturally defined, like painting yourself blue or scarifying your penis. A culture is a limited enterprise. How could someone be so naive as to imagine that an ideology, a thought system generated by the monkey mind, would be adequate to explain the universe? That's preposterous. It's like meeting a termite who tells you he's a philosopher. What could you do but smile at the very notion. — Terence McKenna

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts ... — Terry Pratchett

Enough of thought, philosopher!
Too long hast thou been dreaming
Unlightened, in this chamber drear,
While summer's sun is beaming!
Space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain
Concludes thy musings once again? — Emily Bronte

What is the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher?

A mathematician uses a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.
The philosopher needs only the pencil and paper. — Matthew Rave

A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'
And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful.
It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....
Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'. — Ginger Gilmour

collectivity, on the other hand, is the place of what the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal calls "divertissement," an untranslatable word which roughly means "distraction" or "diversion": It is the escape from life's problems, and also its invitations, into activities that in ultimate terms are meaningless. It is a constant turning to superficial actions as a way to avoid facing the true realities of human life. The soap operas and situation comedies easily become an addiction. They take the place of the "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. There was plenty wrong with Roman society and the Roman emperors offered the diversion of food and entertainment to make people forget the banality and meaninglessness of the lives they lived. Our society does much the same and has ever so much more in the way of sophisticated tools for doing so. — William H. Shannon

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded?

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, "It's easier to jump out of a plane - hopefully with a parachute - than it is to change your mind about an opinion. — Steven D. Levitt

I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result. — Alanis Morissette

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Reuven listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other."
"Choose a friend," I said.
"Yes. You know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul."
I nodded.
"Reuven, if you can, make Danny Saunders your friend."
"I like him a lot, abba."
"No. Listen to me. I am not talking about only liking him. I am telling you to make him your friend and to let him make you his friend. — Chaim Potok

I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us? — Steve Toltz

There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? — Peter Medawar

What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.' — Don Feder

Because here's the thing that's wrong with all of the "How to Be Happy" shit that's been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few years - here's what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I'll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It's what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as "the backwards law" - the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The — Mark Manson

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: "The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation." That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine if some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: "The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation." We'd probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn't base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud. — Eric Weiner

The goddess is not an out-there force among the far stars or beyond death, but is here and now and living. In philosopher Mary Daly's concept of active creation, she is a verb rather than none and is women's Be-ing. Since the goddess is everyone within and all around us, the powers of divinity and creation are both individual and shared by all. She is the power to make of women's lives what women will. With the tenant, "Thou Art Goddess", free of choice is a central issue; women take charge of who they are and what they do, not with blame or guilt, but with responsibility for their actions and choices. — Diane Stein

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet. — Mary Midgley

Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,
indeed, rapt
attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime. — Winifred Gallagher

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus taught his students that what happens to them is not as important as what they believe happens to them. In this engaging and provocative book, Eldon Taylor provides his readers with specific ways in which their beliefs can lead to success or failure in their life undertakings. Each chapter provides nuggets of wisdom as well as road maps for guiding them toward greater self-understanding, balance, responsibility, and compassion. — Stanley Krippner

I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply. — Debra Dean

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. 'You must pay attention to me,' he urged. 'If something happens you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this - that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget that. — Sherwood Anderson

"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry." — Umberto Eco

Gjerji raises his hand. In English he says, "I like to tell in the words of a great American philosopher what freedom is."
"Say it in your language to your peers," I urge.
Gyerji makes his statement. The class grows silent and thoughtful; there is much nodding. Twain perhaps? Emerson? Diana sidles up and whispers in my ear. "He says to them that freedom is a word when nothing is anymore able to be losed."
Janis Joplin, de-syntaxed. — Laura Kelly

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition! — William James

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body. — Jacques Loeb

Resentment is a storytelling passion,' says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. — Rebecca Solnit

To maximize what you get out of your college experience, I want your friends to look at your semester schedule and say "this is the weirdest schedule I've ever seen!"
Trust me on this one. If you want to be an engineer, take Engineering 101, and a crash course in philosophical literature. then take Engineering 102, and art appreciation. then Engineering 103, and Intro to Women's Rights.
You will expand your knowledge and ways of looking at the world, and become a more powerful person for it. Because that way, when you encounter difficulties, you won't only tackle the problem from the point of view of an engineer. Anybody can do that. You will be able to look at it as a scientist, a philosopher, an artist, and choose the best course of action from there. — Anonymous

The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu stated that true empathy requires listening with the whole being: The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty. — Thomas Sowell

And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die. — Victor Hugo

Every time you use the Dragonflame philosophy, you refine your subtle body and stengthen your will by going through the process of separating the dross from the subtle and putting it back together again. Every time you follow this magical philosophy, you are doing what is know as the Great Work. In other words, every time you work magic using Dragonflame, you get closer to finding the Philosopher's Stone. — Lawren Leo

You're a dreamer, boy," he said. "Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it's never
going to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don't give a damn about money, and you're
too much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You need
someone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket.
Once I'm gone, you'll be right back where you started. — Paul Auster

The vast body of literature, in every domain, is composed of hand-me-down ideas. The question - never resolved, alas! - is to what extent it would be efficacious to curtail the overwhelming supply of cheap fodder. One thing is certain today - the illiterate are definitely not the least intelligent among us. If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we can dispense with 'the masters. — Henry Miller

Descartes' Meditations; doubt rise and results in clear and distinct ideas. all in the mind and all innate. Spinoza bakes the best cake, love God intellectually. Oh! God, he should have stuck to polishing glasses or gotten married. Then dear Philosopher we what mettle your are of. Soren Kierkgaard is the king of leer; life is a disease unto death, he proclaimed till death claimed him early. And Nietzche? following Schopenhauer's Superman- was nursed by his sister despite crying foul of the female race and died a wreck man. All theory no practice. Sartre was better , loyal to Simon De ... Both lay next to each other in Paris, witout marrying. — Aporva Kala

What did Jonathan Edwards mean in sending word to his wife that their union was "uncommon"? Was it that? And how was a union that had issued in eleven offspring "spiritual"? Of one thing we may be sure: Jonathan Edwards was not using his last words carelessly. This "major artist and chief American philosopher" (Miller, 1949:225) had not yet discarded his palette. His message to her had - all his words had - an exact, uncoded meaning, Lockean in its empirical force, that is there for us to recover if we will attend. Our path is to discover if we can the substance of this "uncommon" and "spiritual" union that was at the same time unquestionably an erotic bond. Something greater than curiosity is at stake for us here. Jonathan Edwards is preeminently a theologian of the heart and of the affections; to discover the kind of love that was central between these two may provide an exact clue to his own theological ethics - a bonus not to be disdained. — James William McClendon Jr.

Similarly, if we ask "What have philosophers ever done for us?" we get involved in the following dialogue:
"Well, their examples help us to decide what we think about issues we haven't thought about before."
"Oh, yeah, well, that goes without saying, doesn't it?"
"And their examples help us discover whether we really believe what we say we believe, or not."
" Yeah, all right. I'll grant you that their examples help us to work out what we think, and to think better. But apart from helping us to work out what we think, clarifying our views, and helping us to solve hard problems, what do philosophers ever do for us?"
"Well, their examples are amusing."
James Taylor, "Why is a Philosopher Like a Python? — Gary L. Hardcastle

In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what's remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority. — Michael Dirda

There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide," the text began. I winced. "Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories," it continued, "comes afterward"; such questions, the text explained, were part of the game humanity played, but they deserved attention only after the one true issue had been settled. The book was The Myth of Sisyphus and was written by the Algerian-born philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. After a moment, the iciness of his words melted under the light of comprehension. Yes, of course, I thought. You can ponder this or analyze that till the cows come home, but the real question is whether all your ponderings and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to. Everything else is detail. — Brian Greene

For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent. — Giacomo Casanova

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, — Henry David Thoreau

The technology [semiconductors] which has transformed practical existence is largely an application of what was discovered by these allegedly irresponsible [natural] philosophers. — Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialoge? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy. — Ernest Hemingway,

If what the philosophers say be true, that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage. — Epictetus

Life is just a series of peaks and troughs, and you don't whether you're in a trough until you're climbing out, or on a peak until you're coming down. And that's it, you know, you never know what's round the corner. But it's all good. "If you want the rainbow you've got to put up with the rain". Do you know which "philosopher" said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she's just a big pair of tits. — David Brent

In his book After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the present cultural moment to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. He argued that the West has abandoned reason and the tradition of the virtues in giving itself over to the relativism that is now flooding our world today. We are governed not by faith, or by reason, or by any combination of the two. We are governed by what MacIntyre called emotivism: the idea that all moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the choosing individual feels is right. MacIntyre — Rod Dreher

A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men ... he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all ... Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men. — G.K. Chesterton

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to ... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' — Friedrich Nietzsche

Lying is not a sin, since there has never been a law-maker or philosopher who could determine what truth is. I lie for the fun of it. I lie for the fear of the gravity of life. I lie out of boredom. How can anyone who has more fantasy than the Catholic evening paper get by without lying? — Iwan Goll

The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. When I first read this statement, the thought, 'What nonsense!' shot through my mind before I realized that I had just made an evaluation. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

All tradition,' said the Professor, 'is a type of spiritual truth. The superstitions of the East, and the mythologies of the North - the beautiful Fables of old Greece, and the bold investigations of modern science - all tend to elucidate the same principles; all take their root in those promptings and questionings which are innate in the brain and heart of man. Plato believed that the soul was immortal, and born frequently; that it knew all things; and that what we call learning is but the effort which it makes to recall the wisdom of the Past. "For to search and to learn," said the poet-philosopher, "is reminiscence all." At the bottom of every religious theory, however wild and savage, lies a perception - dim perhaps, and distorted, but still a perception - of God and immortality. — Amelia B. Edwards

Like Spinoza, he has a certain kind of moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man. The life of Plotinus is known, — Bertrand Russell

A dog is the best philosopher because he knows what you want and gives you that with kindness and love. — Debasish Mridha

Even this abbreviated rundown of mind-brain philosophies would not be complete without what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls "don't-have-clue materialism." This is the default position of those who have no idea about the origins of consciousness or the mind but assert that "it must be physical, as materialism must be true," as Chalmers puts it. "Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print." One might add that many working scientists hold this view without really reflecting on the implications of it. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. — William James

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. — Edward Abbey

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception. — Samuel Moyn

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to what is known in nature. - St. AUGUSTINE, LATIN PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN — Pam Grout

Talk about polygamy! There is no true philosopher on the face of the earth but what will admit that such a system, properly carried out according to the order of heaven, is far superior to monogamy for the raising of healthy, robust children! — Brigham Young

You can't tolerate a decent and swift conclusion to a skirmish between an individual and what you call society, as long as you have it in your power to turn it into a ghastly and prolonged struggle; the victim must squirm like a worm in your fingers, not for ten minutes, but for ten months. Pfui! I don't like the law. It was not I, but a great philosopher, who said that the law is an ass. — Rex Stout

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment. — Daniel Bell

To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time 'But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what's going to happen in the future?' Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I'm going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I'm going to be revered? There wasn't time to ask. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher. — Epictetus

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard made a similar observation about the use of material goods as symbols of immaterial values. He noted that any given material object has two kinds of value: it has use value (the amount of utility which can be derived from the good), and it has sign value (a value based on what the object means to the person who owns it.) Advertisers constantly attempt to increase the amount that people will pay for products by infusing them with artificial sign value. Emotional branding, for example, is the practice of using images to link a product with a positive emotional state, so that people will unthinkingly purchase the product when they crave the emotion. — Melinda Selmys

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. — Alain De Botton

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that the truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to - then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, according to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled good, or order be relatively replete with exquisite and subtile evil. To neither of these conclusions, which are equally presumptuous and unfounded, will it become the philosopher to assent. Order and disorder are expressions denoting our perceptions of what is injurious or beneficial to ourselves, or to the beings in whose welfare we are compelled to sympathize by the similarity of their conformation to our own. — Christopher Hitchens

The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the "general principles which are always the same." In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

A philosopher will not believe what he sees because he is too busy speculating about what he does not see. — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

Philosopher William Lane Craig reminds us that an infinite regress of causes is like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit. How do you start if you never reach the bottom? On the other hand, one might well ask, if every birth is a rebirth, what kamma was paid for in his first birth? — Ravi Zacharias

Wisdom
I who have decided to love mankind
instead of men,

to love life's contradictions,
impossibilities.

I who have grown into a fine old
philosopher, when suddenly

the telephone rings, his voice
prickling the length of my neck.

Or he teases me, calls me
sweet little goose
and my heart careens.

What we love in another
is the life in that person;
that is why we must never
seek to possess him.

sweet little goose — Janice Kulyk Keefer

No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking - that I KNOW what thinking is. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It may be objected that the meaning of names can guide us at most only to the opinions, possibly the foolish and groundless opinions, which mankind have formed concerning things, and that as the object of philosophy is truth, not opinion, the philosopher should dismiss words and look into things themselves, to ascertain what questions can be asked and answered in regard to them. — John Stuart Mill

Now in giving honor to one's parents or to the gods, as indeed the Philosopher says, it is impossible to repay them measure for measure; but it suffices that man repay as much as he can, for friendship does not demand measure for measure, but what is possible. — Peter Kreeft

What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions. — Slavoj Zizek

I do not think a philosopher who would apply himself so earnestly to the explaining the ultimate principles of the soul, would show himself a great master in the very science of human nature, which he pretends to explain, or very knowing in what is naturally satisfactory to the mind of man. — David Hume

What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance? — John Grier Hibben

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! — Stephen Hawking

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight. — Wilhelm Reich

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. — Rebecca Solnit

I knew it! I knew it! "
"Are we allowed to speak yet?" said Ron grumpily. Hermione ignored him.
"Nicolas Flamel," she whispered dramatically, "is the only known maker of the Philosopher's Stone!"
This didn't have quite the effect she'd expected.
"The what?" said Harry and Ron.
"Oh, honestly, don't you two read? Look - read that, there. — J.K. Rowling

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man. — Denis Diderot

A man who swears
before the world to love a woman till death part him and her is sane
neither in the opinion of the philosopher who understands what
mutability is nor in the opinion of the man of the world who
understands that it is safer to be a witness than an actor in such
affairs. A man who swears to do something which it is not in his power
to do is not accounted a sane man. — James Joyce

And Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, expressly writes: 'For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek.' — Clement Of Alexandria

When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.' It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government. — Henry Hazlitt

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist. — Joseph McCabe

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: "What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies," Kuhn wrote, " ... . [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis." Instead, he concluded, "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place." That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it. — Kathryn Schulz

...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream. — Emmanue Levinas

Finally there is the topic we talked about earlier, which is of great interest to me at the moment, the relationship between biology and culture. I've been reading the work of the late philosopher and theologian Claude Tresmontant. Tresmontant was a Christian, but his books interest me for what they have to say about genetic programming. He situates Christianity at the point of transition between genetic programming - dominant in archaic societies with regard to territorial defense, sexual and hoarding instincts, and so forth - and a new kind of evolutionary programming contained in culture rather than in genes. The argument is suggestive, but it needs to be developed further. Tresmontant doesn't take into account archaic religion, which he conflates with genetic programming in animals. Room has to be made for one more stage. MSB — Rene Girard

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. — Albert Einstein

Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good. Did this never strike you as curious? The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark. And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming; - your dog is a true philosopher. Why? Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing. And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance? Most — Plato

The situations depicted in the Book of Changes are the primary data of life
what happens to everybody, every day, and what is simple and easy to understand. — Hellmut Wilhelm