The quotations follow the philosopher's name, which are listed alphabetically. Where I know the source of the quotation, it is listed; although full bibliographical information is not listed. [Donald Wayne Viney]
All men by nature desire to know. Metaphysics 980a
The intellect is a tablet on which nothing is written. De Anima 429b 30-430a1
. . . it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking. Metaphysics 1074b 33-34
Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible. De Anima 429a17
Events far-reaching enough to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory . . .
"The Witness"
There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived is to respond to the fundamental question of philosophy. The Myth of Sisyphus
We get in the habit of living before acquiring that of thinking. The Myth of Sisyphus
[The early Greek philosophers] asked questions about anything; they stood unafraid in the presence of religious or political taboos; and boldly subpoenaed every creed and institution to appear before the judgment-seat of reason. The Story of Philosophy
Vital religion is like good music. It needs no defense, only rendition. A wrangling controversy in support of religion is as if the members of the orchestra should beat the folks over the head with their violins to prove that the music is beautiful.
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1, 1962, p. 304
The process of thinking about philosophy always reminds me of fireworks. One question is shot up and bursts into a splendorous many. Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions. The Mind-Body Problem (1983), p. 35.
God is the self-surpassing surpasser of all. Divine Relativity, p. 20
Television flatters mediocrity of many kinds.
We belong to a species that gives signs of having lost its way.
God’s possession of us is our final achievement, not our possession of God.
God surpasses us, not by the narrower but by the incomparably wider scope of the divine love or sympathy.
quotes from Wisdom as Moderation, pp. 33, 35, 90, 118
[The idea that God is the unmoved mover is] a perfect example of a half-truth parading as the whole truth. A God who loves and is loved by the creatures is anything but unmoved. God is the most and best moved mover.
"Communication" (1991), p. 69
It is not possible to step twice into the same river.
[Heraclitus also said, "In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not." Also: "Those who step into the same river have different waters flowing ever upon them.]
Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man. Enquiry sec. 1
Half the human race dies before becoming rational.
"Of Immortality"
When we run over our libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Enquiry sec. 12
The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
"Of Miracles"
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly. Principles of Psychology VI
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
Letter of April 30, 1870
Our knowledge is a drop, our ignorance a sea.
If the best use of our colleges is to give young men a wider openness of mind and a more flexible way of thinking than special technical training can generate, then we hold that philosophy (taken in the broad sense in which our correspondent uses the word) is the most important of all college studies. However skeptical one may be of the attainment of universal truths (and to make our position more emphatic, we are willing here to concede the extreme Positivistic position), one can never deny that philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective. Touchstone’s question, “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” will never cease to be one of the tests of a well-born nature. It says, Is there space and air in your mind, or must your companions gasp for breath whenever they talk with you? And if our colleges make men, not machines, they should look, above all thing, to this aspect of their influence . . . The Philosophy of William James
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
"The Will to Believe"
Though all knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises out of experience. Critique of Pure Reason
Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing wonder and reverence the oftener and more fervently reflection ponder on it: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. Critique of Pure Reason
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow, . . . Lamia Part II
"Truth is beauty, beauty truth."
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name. Tao Te Ching Bk I, I
A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one's feet. Tao Te Ching Bk II, LXIV
To know yet to think one does not know is best. Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty. Tao Te Ching Bk II, LXXI
In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. Tao Te Ching Bk II, LXXVIII
Such then is the way things are connected. The action that everyone calls unimportant is the one whose repercussion is perceived by no one, and it is only by reason of ignorance that one succeeds in being unconcerned. Œuvres complètes, p. 14
It is an act of freedom that affirms freedom. Œuvres complètes, p. 67
Dieu, qui m'a crée createur de moi-même.
[God, who created me creator of myself.] Œuvres complètes, p. 70
Terrible prodigy: man deliberates and God waits. Œuvres complètes, p. 71
What do we know of that which is open or of that which is closed for us in the future for our free acts, and I speak even of the least of them? No more than I know if this movement of my hand transmits a movement, and what movement, to the extremities of Asia. How our own being escapes us, especially as it expands more and more. Œuvres complètes, p. 210
The All-Powerful, the divine poet, in no way brings about the appearance on the world scene of characters who come to fill a roll decided for them in advance--these imitations of life are the games of human genius. Who could make of the work of God so frivolous and so base an idea! God made man free and capable himself of resisting even him. When he acts on us, he has said, it is with a great respect. Œuvres complètes, p. 212
To will is always to will with audacity and passion.
Letter to Le Gal la Salle in 1839
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach
[Religion] is the opium of the people. Toward a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
[Hegel] stands the world on its head and can therefore dissolve in the head all the limitations which naturally remain in existence for evil sensuousness, for real man . . . The whole of Phenomenology is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.
Critique of Hegel in The Holy Family
There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
Thinking is a kind of action, and reasoning is a kind of deliberate action; and to call an argument illogical, or a proposition false, is a special kind of moral judgment, and as such is inapplicable to what we cannot help. Collected Papers
Love is only birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.
[Socrates relating Diotima's views in Plato's Symposium—some scholars believe that Diotima never existed.]
Man is the measure of all things.
[To which an unknown woman of the 10th century replied, "Then 'tis a poor ruler we measure by." Crone's Book of Wisdom]
On ne sert la philosophie dignment qu'avec la même passion qu'on sent pour une maitresse. [One serves philosophy properly only with the same passion that one feels for a mistress.]
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd
(His glassy essence), like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As to make the angels weep; who with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal . . . Measure for Measure Act II, 2
Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?
Touchstone in As You Like It Act III, 1
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Plato's Apology
. . . he who will really fight for the right, if he would live even for a little while, must have a private station and not a public one.
Plato's Apology
The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.
Plato's Apology
Tout ce qui monte converge [Everything that rises must converge.] Building the Earth
The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the tides, and gravitation, we will harness the energies of love for God. And then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
“Evolution of Chastity”
[Teilhard was fond of saying, union differentiates; he explains:] . . . true union (this is spiritual union, or union in synthesis) differentiates the elements it brings together. This is no paradox, but the law of all experience. Two beings never love one another with a more vivid consciousness of themselves than when each is swallowed up in the other. How I Believe
. . . co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within of things. The Phenomenon of Man
Properly speaking, God does not make: He makes things make themselves. Christianity and Evolution
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord art more than they. In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII
Hold thou the good;
define it well;
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her
mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords
of Hell. In Memoriam LIII
All the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidently recommend our mud-pies to each other’s sympathetic consideration.
Reported in Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key
I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.
America is . . . one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not read the works of Descartes, because their social condition deters them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims, because this same social condition naturally disposes their minds to adopt them.
Both quotes taken from Democracy in America, volume II, Chapter 1. In the second quote Tocqueville refers to the habit of Americans to appeal "only to the individual effort of his own understanding."
Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.
The power of God is the worship He inspires.
quotes from Science and the Modern World pp. 258, 266, 276
But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Ceasar.
. . . God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
quotes from Process and Reality, pp. 259, 342, 351
[Apart from God] . . . every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
"Immortality" p. 698
Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. The Function of Reason p. 12
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it. Concept of Nature p. 163
Philosophy begins in wonder. And when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding. Modes of Thought
But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies (of their god's) in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.
Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?