Philosopher Quotes - Page 14

• The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosopher has always been at this point. The non-Christian philosopher has always said that man is normal now, but biblical Christianity says he is abnormal now.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Biblical, Thinking

  Francis Schaeffer (2013). “He Is There and He Is Not Silent”, p.27, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time.

  Sergio Leone

  Reality, Ideas, America

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• Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  People, Risk, Fragility

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.347, Random House

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• A lot of our fellow liberals ... seem to me rather to doom themselves to futility in public affairs because the won't recognize that there's a zone of natural affection midway between the inner, or family one, and the outer, or all-humanity one. I suppose they are somehow short of a zone themselves and they seem to get vexed... The common man knows better, just as he'd know better if some philosopher told him he ought not to make invidious distinctions by feeding his own children in preference to others. But of course he can't explain; he just ... goes on feeding the kids.

  Charles Edward Montague

  Children, Kids, Men

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• More investment sins are probably committed by otherwise quite intelligent people because of "tax considerations" than from any other cause. One of my friends-a noted West Coast philosopher-maintains that a majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do. This is certainly the case when an emotionally supercharged element like taxes enters the picture (I have another friend-a noted East Coast philosopher who says it isn't the lack of representation he minds-it's the taxation).

  Warren Buffett

  Intelligent, Errors, People

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• I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'

  Arianna Huffington

  Good Life, College, Greek

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• It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

  Paul Zane Pilzer

  Fate, Keys, Heaven

  Paul Zane Pilzer (1990). “Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy”, Crown

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• Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Book, Mean, Simple

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• There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with philosophers and poets, or playwrights. We do not live in that moment, and the best way to gauge the proximity of an academic field to power is by salary.

  Elliott Colla

  Humanity, Salary, Gauges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Because the Western civilization is dominated by dualistic thinking, holistic scientists and philosophers don't get the recognition they deserve.

  Satish Kumar

  Thinking, Civilization, Recognition

  Interview with Frank Lipman, www.drfranklipman.com. April 14, 2009.

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• An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it so seriously.

  Bernie Glassman

  Comic, Said, Cosmic

  Jeff Bridges, Bernie Glassman (2013). “The Dude and the Zen Master”, p.16, Penguin

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• I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look from above, and realize that we are not special, none of us are, I think it would just cause a transformation.

  Paul Bloom

  Thinking, Views, Special

  "Paul Bloom: The Trouble With Empathy". Interview with Allyson Kirkpatrick, www.guernicamag.com. February 1, 2016.

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• As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

  Will Oldham

  Kids, Thinking, Ideas

  "Will Oldham’s Fourth Dimension". Interview With T. Cole Rachel, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 10, 2016.

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• I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

  George Pattison

  Philosophical, Character, Human Life

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.

  George Pattison

  Religious, Real, Thinking

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.

  George Pattison

  Religious, Thinking, Nihilism

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• It's strange that in an age when we pride ourselves on our independence of thought we meekly submit without further question to the declaration of a clearly unbalanced nineteenth century philosopher that God is dead! That's cheeky, of course - and one rarely comes away from reading Nietzsche without learning something new and significant. He's certainly FAR more unsettling for faith than any contemporary atheist I know of.

  George Pattison

  Atheist, Reading, Pride

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• So even these stages of progression, whether it's your career or whatever, you get somewhere, but then it always brings a new host of issues that are relative dissatisfactions to a certain degree. I think it was a great philosopher who once said, "Mo' money, mo' problems."

  Steve Zissis

  Thinking, Careers, Issues

  "Amanda Peet and Steve Zissis discuss what the second season holds for Togetherness". Interview with Gwen Ihnat, www.avclub.com. February 21, 2016.

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• Robert Nozick [a Havard philosopher, famous for his book "Anarchy, State and Utopia"] defined revenge as delivering the message that you know what someone has done, and it doesn't involve hurting them or doing anything to them beyond that. It's just delivering the message that their crime has been noted not just by its victims, because the victim might be dead, but by another who has a different moral view and will challenge the perpetrator's view.

  Errol Morris

  Hurt, Revenge, Book

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary philosophers are mainly trying to figure out what is true about the mind. Of course Hume and Plato were trying to do that, hence my misapprehension.

  Patricia Churchland

  Plato, Philosophy, College

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.

  Patricia Churchland

  Analysis, Ends, I Realized

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.

  Patricia Churchland

  Mean, Doe, World

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.

  Patricia Churchland

  Thinking, Foundation, Half

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?

  Patricia Churchland

  Mean, Two, Long

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description.

  Patricia Churchland

  Trying, Analysis, May

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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