A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidi...
The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it ...
Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.
Philosophy is the highest music.
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
There must be a mechanical [physical] outlet for spiritual inspiration. You must DO [in the physical] what you see [in the spiritual], or become BLIND in that particular.
If we indulge in inordinate affection, anger, anxiety, God holds us responsible; but He also insists that we have to be passionately filled with the right emotions.
Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.
We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.
For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German c...
A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his "true" philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked...
(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability...
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that syst...
Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, "Why?
Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or co...
But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it n...
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram:...
I am not the lonely human, plunked down on earth to aimlessly wander. I am a part of that earth and not going anywhere- just like the spider up in the corner, the dust on the sill, and the cat I buried in the backyard. -Jamaica Ritcher.
Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, t...
Those who make compassion an essential part of their lives find the joy of life. Kindness deepens the spirit and produces rewards that cannot be completely explained in words. It is an experience more powerful than words. To become acquainted with ki...
