quotations about philosophy
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
DR. SEUSS
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
If your divines are not philosophers, your philosophy will neither be divine, nor able to divine.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Man is a philosopher in spite of himself.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.
HORACE BUSHNELL
Sermons for the New Life
The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
lecture, "Year of Distraction"
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils -- no, nor the human race, as I believe -- and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.
PLATO
The Republic
Across the Night of Paganism, Philosophy flitted on, like the Lantern-fly of the Tropics, a Light to itself, and an Ornament, but alas! no more than an ornament, of the surrounding Darkness.
STEPHEN TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Aids to Reflection
A philosopher ... is not fairly judged by his eccentricities, nor by the frailties to which he is liable; still less should his philosophy as a whole fall into ill-repute because of those among its devotees who have stumbled into wells, or who aimlessly pass their lives in whetting their faculties and then neglecting to use them.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
Philosophy is common sense with big words.
JAMES MADISON
attributed, Quote Junkie Presidents Edition
Adults complicate things. When faced with a complex or controversial problem, grownups have a tendency to gravitate toward the details and sometimes lose sight of the big picture. Conversely, ask most children about how to solve the same problem and you'll often receive a simple, straightforward solution. Sometimes oversimplified, it's true, but often far wiser than one would expect, considering the source. Out of the mouths of babes... I think some of the world's best philosophers are able to hold onto this child's way of perceiving the things around them. Peeling away the layers surrounding an issue, finding the central kernel of truth and picking it out for the world to see and understand.
SHEA WINTERBERGER
"Living & Growing: We can all learn from children's books", Juneau Empire, April 10, 2016
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy
More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Philosophers are both effects and causes: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
History of Western Philosophy
The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
ROGER SCRUTON
Short History of Modern Philosophy
There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect ... What is philosophy today ... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality
Sublime Philosophy!
Thou art the patriarch's ladder, reaching heaven;
And bright with beckoning angels--but alas!
We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams,
By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
J. M. COETZEE
interview, Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1992