The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only r...
Apostasy was the major justification for terminating internal opposition throughout the history of Islamic empires. That is why we have heard of whole tribes and groups being eradicated for apostasy. Muslim philosophers, mathematicians and scientists...
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atl...
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much. But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. ...
Simply put, the relative age of a philosophical perspective has nothing to do with its veracity. It is pure illusion to imagine that just because a view of life was held and put to words long ago, that it is more valid.
If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, s...
I'm not a philosopher, Harry," [Michael] said. "But here's something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what's coming around." He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. "And someti...
No one can tell you for certain if we have free will or we don't. [...] Whatever you choose to believe, you will probably want to agree with the philosopher John Locke, who argued that the whole debate is largely irrelevant. If it feels to us like fr...
A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other ...
The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception o...
[Il ne manque cependant à l'oisiveté du sage qu'un meilleur nom, et que méditer, parler, lire, et être tranquille s'appelât travailler.] There is, however, nothing wanting to the idleness of a philosopher but a better name, and that meditation, ...
The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go ...
Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.’ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but you continued, ‘How can someone hope to treat another person...
A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part:...
And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might a...
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delici...
Despite its successes, in the end, philosophical thinking always falls short of its real goal. It involves both the wonder of aspiring toward the Truth and the distress of falling short of that Truth. In this way, philosophy can be characterized as w...
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like ...
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 ...
Sombres, dites-vous? Mais posez-vous la question docteur : pourquoi tous les grands philosophes sont-ils sombres? Demandez-vous qui sont les gens satisfaits, rassurés et éternellement joyeux! Laissez-moi vous donner la réponse : ― la populace et...
My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years, I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a...
