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Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
-Plato
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Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
-Karl Popper
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Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.
-Edgar Quinet
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The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.
-W. Winwood Reade
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Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.
-Jim Rohn
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The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
-Richard Rorty
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Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Philosophers call God the great unknown The great misknown is more like it!
-Joseph Roux
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Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.
-Bertrand Russell
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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
-Bertrand Russell The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
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There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity.
-Carl Sagan
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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
-Carl Sagan
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
-George Santayana Egotism in German Philosophy
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How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
-Arthur Schopenhauer Studies in Pessimism
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Philosophy is nothing but discretion.
-John Selden
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The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
-Wilfred Sellars Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man
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Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.
-William Shakespeare
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The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.
-Sydney Smith
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Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
-Socrates
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My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you
-Socrates
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A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.
-Gertrude Stein
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
-Wallace Stevens
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