A History of Western Philosophy Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

A History of Western Philosophy

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,...

A History of Western Philosophy

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

A History of Western Philosophy

Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intellige...

A History of Western Philosophy

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

A History of Western Philosophy

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, a...

A History of Western Philosophy

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

A History of Western Philosophy

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

A History of Western Philosophy

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

A History of Western Philosophy

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

A History of Western Philosophy

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

A History of Western Philosophy

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before t...

A History of Western Philosophy