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Philosophy

 

"No praise, then, is too great for philosophy!"

Cicero

 

"Philosophy is the art of living."

Plutarch

 

"Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering."

-Epicurus

 

"They specialized in an activity that one could call in modern language pastoral care, life counseling or psychotherapy"

-Hans-Josef Kauck

 

"Philosophy is really homesickness."

Novalis (1772-1801)

 

"I have always been impressed by the fact that the most studiously avoided subject in Western Philosophy is that of happiness."

Lin Yutang

 

 

"The first business of a philosopher is, to part with self-conceit."

Epictetus

 

"The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering them."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

"True philosophers are always occupied in the practice of dying."

Plato

 

"Higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy, proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead."

-Oswald Spengler

 

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."

Nietzsche

 

"The true Philosopher is the man who loves to look with admiration at the truth. The truth of things, however, is that which they are in themselves."

Eric Voegelin

 

"Alexander wishes health to Aristotle: You have not done well in publishing abroad these sciences which should only be taught by word of mouth, otherwise how shall we be distinguished from other men if the knowledge we have acquired is made the common property of all?"

Alexander the Great

 

"As for Diseases of the Mind, against them Philosophy is provided of Remedies; being, in that respect, justly accounted the Medicine of the Mind."

-Epicurus

 

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school.....It is to solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically."

-Henry David Thoreau

 

"There was once a time when, by devoting myself to philosophy and to contemplation of the world and its parts, I achieved the enjoyment of that Mind which was truly beautiful, desirable, and blessed; for I lived in constant communion with sacred utterances and teachings, in which I greedily and insatiably rejoiced. No base or worldly thoughts occurred to me, nor did I grovel for glory, wealth, or bodily comfort, but seemed ever to be borne aloft into the heights with a rapture of soul, and to accompany sun, moon, heaven and universe in their revolutions."

Philo of Alexandria

 

"Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it."

Bacon

 

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Wittgenstein

 

"To be a Philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts ....But to so  love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates. A life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

Thoreau

 

"The criers of philosophy call all men to a comradeship of the spirit. To a fraternity of thought. To a convocation of Selves. Philosophy invites men out of the vanity  of selfishness; out of the sorrow of ignorance and the despair of worldliness; out of the Travesty of Ambition and the cruel clutches of greed; out of the red hell of hate and the cold tomb of dead idealism."

Manly P. Hall

 

"Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of removing the inborn realism that arises from the original disposition of the intellect.....In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at everything in a different light. But only in this way does a man become susceptible to the more positive explanations I have to give."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation

 

 

   "The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the years that have gone before. By the exertions of others we are led to the fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were mined. No age is forbidden us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it with the Cynics.."

Seneca (4 B.C. -A.D. 65)

 

 

..."This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather of transforming it into immortality. Honors, monuments, all that ambition has blazoned in inscriptions or piled high in some tomb will speedily sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of times does not dilapidate and exterminate. But the dedications of philosophy rare impregnable; age cannot erase their memory or diminish their force. Each succeeding generation will hold them in ever higher reverence; what is close at hand is subject to envy, whereas the distant we can admire without prejudice. The philosopher's life is therefore spacious; he is not hemmed in and constricted like others. He alone is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at a god's. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollections. Is time now present? He utilizes it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into makes his life long."

Seneaca

"He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things. He must not assume a position in a debate before he has listened to the various opinions, and considered and compared the reasons for and against. He must never judge or take up a position on the evidence of what he has heard, on the opinion of the majority, the age, merits, or prestige of the speaker concerned, but he must proceed according to the persuasion of an organic doctrine which adheres to real things, and to a truth that can be understood by the light of reason."

-Giordano Bruno

"There are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyrannism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again how little used to be sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old superstition from time immemorial (like the old soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not yet ceased to do mischief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts."

Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

 

"The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world-denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's pose par excellence-it is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloak, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which the philosopher could live and creep about."

Nietzsche

 

"Philosophy-a witch's pudding brew, a big black battered cauldron full of a heterogeneous stew, odd bits and scrapments tossed in by various philosophical cooks, all heated from below by the fire of controversy. From the purling bubbling mess ascends a steam, a heavy vaporous cloud, obscuring somewhat the bearded cooks squatting around the huge pot. Every now and then some old man throws another chunk of fatty meat into the mixture, and though occasionally some indomitable dogmatist jumps up, tries to kick the fire apart, declaring the stew finished, the truth is that the stew is far from finished and probably never will be."

-Edward Abbey

 

"The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell."

-Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498)

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www.noesis.evansville.edu (this is a way that scholars can freely give their ideas to the global community.)

Book: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 Book: "The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought" by Ben-Ami Scharstein

Book: "Plato in 90 Minutes" by Paul Strathem

Book: "Critical Path" by Richard Buckminister Fuller

Book: "A Dictionary of Philosophy, Revised Edition" Ed. by Anthony Flew

Book: "A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thinkers. by Chris Rohmann

Book: "The Columbia History of Western Philosophy" Ed. by Richard H. Popkin

Book "Readings in Medieval Philosophy" by Andrew B. Schoefinger

Book: "The Enneads" by Plotinus

Book: "A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber

Book: "A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000" by Bruce Kukick

Book: "Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason" By Beatrice Longuenesse

Book: The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting" Ed. by Galen A. Johnson

Book: "Peirce, Signs, and Meaning" by Floyd Merrell

Book: "Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically" by Doublas Thomas

Book: "Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography" by Rudiger Safranski

Book: "Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy" by Lisa Jane Disch

Book: "Reasons and Persons" by Derek Parfit

Book: "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" ed by Ted Honderich

Book: "The Oxford History of Western Philosophy" ed by Anthony Kenny

Book: "The Philosophy of Schopenhaur" by Bryan Magee

Book: "A Very Brief History of Philosophy" by Robert C. Solomon & Kathleen M. Higgins

 

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See: MANAS…..www.manasrepreints.com

Book: World Philosophies. by Ninian Smart

Book: "Philosophy and Art "Ed by Daniel O. Dahistrom

Book: "Women of Color and Philosophy" Ed. by Naomi Zack

Book: "Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To Western Thought" by George Lakoff & Mark Johmun

Book: "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy"…ed. Robert Audi

Book: Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Book: "The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought." by Mortimer Adler

Book: "Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy" by Arthur C. Danto

Book: "WAY TO WISDOM; An introduction to Philosophy" by Karl Jaspers

Book: "The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy" by Collin McGinn

Book: "Plato: Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom To Everyday Problems" by Lou Marinoff P.hd.

Book: "The Philosophies of Asia" by Alan Watts

Book: "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays" by John Dewey

Book: "One Thousand Years Of Philosophy: From Ramanuja to Wittgenstein" by Rom Harre

Book: "A History of Philosophy in America" by Bruce Kukick

Book: "A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" by Christian Detacampagne

Book: "Charles Sanders Peirce, revised Edition" by Joseph Brent

Book: "The Continuity of Peirce's Thought" by Kelly A. Parker

Book: "Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers" by Bryan Magee

Book: "Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography" by Rudiger Safranski

Book: "The Tristan Chord" by Bryan Magee

Book: "The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy" Ed. by Algis Uzdavinys

Book: "The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt" Ed. by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Book: "The Philosopher At the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films" by Mark Rowlands

Book: "Tragic Thoughts At the End Of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory" by G.L. Bruns

 

 

© 2001

E-MAIL@SCHOLAR

ABOUT SCHOLAR ISLAND

Back to Chrestomathy           Next Page