A collection of 845 inspiring quotes about philosophers from various authors and sources.
Maybe I\'m being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don\'t have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn\'t worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.
I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that \'philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.\' Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.
Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?
The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps.
\\'To support a philosopher who does not bring light into the darkness of ignorance is to encourage mediocrity.\\'
The majority in society accumulates contradictions, sees badly and not further than his nose, he is confronted by philosophers who compare, compare and compare to become everyone's ears and eyes.
Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.
How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
I think the nature of songwriters is that they are philosophers, and philosophers have a bent towards poetry and songwriting, so I think that the two run around together. The nature of a songwriter could be philosophical. Looking for universal ideas, a way to say things, get the story across as a means of entertaining, provoking thought.
One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds.
The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.
Philosophers.-We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.
Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.
Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.
Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans Ђ' language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.
While I do not agree with all of the claims made by experimental philosophers, especially those who seem to think xphi will somehow replace the rest of philosophy, I think xphi projects are interesting and important, I love Josh Knobe's work, and that these projects contribute something new and worthwhile to the philosophical conversation.
I do think that metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration, in the sense that philosophers and scientists are both developing models of reality, and furthermore that we all rely to a significant extent on the idea that models which provide elegant, simple and satisfying explanations are more likely to be true.
Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists.