Philosophical Thought Quotes

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.

If what the philosophers say be true, that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.

All history is the history of thought.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical.

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

… the cause for which we fought was higher; our thought wider... That thought was our power

Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.

One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.

Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

Friedrich Nietzsche--the prophet of restless young men everywhere

Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.