Philosophical Morsels

 

• 'Philosophers traditionally drink too much alcohol and coffee, smoke too much and stress over the meaning of life.' –Anne Rooney.

•  'The new locutions used by contemporary philosophers to communicate with one another become more and more involved and private.' –Saxe Commins and Robert N. Linscott.

• 'Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.' –G.W.F. HegeI.

•  'What we need to plumb is the ignorance of the educated and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual.' –Jacques Barzun.

• 'If a single short formula is insisted on, the least objectionable is that philosophy is thought about thought.' –Anthony Quinton.

•  'I have had my results for some time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.' –Carl Friedrich Gauss.

• 'Wisdom is wealth.' –A Swahili proverb.

• 'The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.' –Averroes.

• 'Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.' –Martin Heidegger.

• 'In the history of philosophy, I can only recommend the three A's – Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand.' –Ayn Rand.

• 'The withdrawal of philosophy into a 'professional' shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.' –Paul Feyerabend.

• 'Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him.' –Thomas de Quincey.

• 'I drink, therefore I am . . . drunk.' –René Descartes in a letter.