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Philosophically speaking
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Published Saturday, August 24, 2013 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Aug 24 2013

A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.
-Louis Pasteur

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-George Bernard Shaw

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A little philosophy makes a man an Atheist: a great deal converts him to religion.
-David Hume

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
-G.K. Chesterton

A philosopher always knows what to do until it happens to him.
-Unattributed

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.
-Dr. Joyce Brothers

A philosopher told me that, having examined the civil and political order of societies, he now studied nothing except the savages in the books of explorers, and children in everyday life.
-Nicolas Chamfort

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them.
-Suzanne K. Langer

All philosophy lies in two words: sustain and abstain.
-Epictetus

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
-Lucretius

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
-Sydney J. Harris

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
-David Hume

Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship. Then it moved to Greece and became a philosophy, then it went to Rome and became an institution, and then it went to Europe and became a government. Finally it came to America where we made it an enterprise.
-Richard Halverson

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
-Stephen Vizinczey

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
-Diogenes

Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy.
-Dan O'Neill

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
-Margaret Thatcher

Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.
-Pierre Melville

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
-C.S. Lewis

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
-David Hume

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
-C.S. Lewis

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
-Douglas Adams

History is Philosophy teaching by examples.
-Thucydides

I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time. (In the comic strip Peanuts)
-Charles M. Schulz

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.
-Alice Roosevelt Longworth

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
-John Adams

I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.
-Carol Leifer

If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries, be assured I will operate on Billy Sunday's philosophy: The Devil's had it long enough, and quickly cash the check.
-Jerry Falwell

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
-Abigail Adams

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
-Havelock Ellis

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is a function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
-Murray Kempton

Libertarians secretly worried that ultimately someone will figure out the whole of their political philosophy boils down to "get off my property." News flash: This is not really a big secret to the rest of us.
-John Scalzi

My own philosophy is if you're not having sex, you're finished.
-Helen Gurley Brown

My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.
-Benjamin DeCasseres

My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
-David Hume

Of course I believe that solipsism is the correct philosophy, but that's only one man's opinion.
-Melvin Fitting

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
-René Descartes

One of the strangest delusions of the Western mind is to the effect that a philosophy of profound wisdom is on tap in the East.
-H.L. Mencken

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
-Richard P. Feynman

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.
-Bertrand Russell

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.
-Albert Einstein

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
-Unattributed

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.
-Karl Marx

Philosophy! The lumber of the schools.
-Jonathan Swift

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.
-Christopher Hitchens

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
-Bertrand Russell

Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.
-Paul Kurtz

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
-Freda Adler

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No One There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, "Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles."
-Terry Pratchett

The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubts.
-Morris Raphael Cohen

The highest point of philosophy is to be both wise and simple; this is the angelic life.
-John Chrysotom

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it the most urgently; they are the most helplessly in its power.
-Ayn Rand

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.
-Unattributed

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
-Richard P. Feynman

The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-John Gardner

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
-Albert Camus

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
-James Joyce

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher.
-H.L. Mencken

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not said it.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
-William James

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
-Charles M. Schulz

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. (Life of Pi)
-Yann Martel

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-John F. Kennedy

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.
-Martin L. Gross

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
-Walter Lippmann

While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement.
-Russell Baker


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