Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is – so that he neither seek it nor flee it.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.
Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human – which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race’s distinguishing characteristics – children must be surrounded by animal imagery.
Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.
If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
I’m a teacher and a philosopher by nature… In the end, I’m trying to teach people to live a better life. And if I can do that on top of entertain, then I leave the world a better place.
Back in 2000, I had come to a crossroads in my life, unsure about what career path I should pursue. Shepherd, bouncer, philosopher king, ventriloquist or perhaps man on the flying trapeze. Fortunately, I was guided back onto the path of the magical world of music.
Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.
All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
You wouldn’t believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn’t seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.
It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.
It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
I’ve been very fortunate and met the guys that have become, basically, philosophers and have a kind of sensibility about life that’s very precious.
We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.
Snoopy was a philosopher in a way.
I’m an artist, not a philosopher.
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West – but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
I want to read philosophers.
We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.
My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.
Sometimes I am glad I am not a philosopher – how would I ever complete a single chain of thought when someone is constantly asking me to do something? I don’t think Plato would have been able to write his dialogues if he had a wife who kept bugging him to pass the pita bread.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Summertime, and the reading is easy… Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.
Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.
It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.
There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.
I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author. It’s only me.
The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.
