Western Philosophy Quotes

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science.

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.

Much of the prejudice against Islam in the West stems from a lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam as a religion professed by 1.4 billion people in the world. Westerners tend to view other peoples and other cultures only from the perspective of Western benchmarks and philosophy.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

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

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

I was born Muslim, but for a large part of my life, I wasn't necessarily raised Muslim. My father always kept everything around us, from Western philosophy to Eastern philosophy.

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.

It's foolish to call Chanakya an Indian Machiavelli. Rather, Machiavelli was possibly an Italian Chanakya.

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.

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.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism.

What's that old cowboy saying? Never was a horse that couldn't be rode, never was a man who couldn't be throwed.

A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.

Only in the West did a philosophy develop that was not only no longer the love of wisdom but went so far as to deny the category of wisdom as a legitimate form of knowledge. The result was a hatred of wisdom that should more appropriately be called ‘misosophy’ (literarily hatred of Sophia, Wisdom) rather than philosophy.

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.