philosophers

We all have problems. Or rather, everyone has at least one thing that they regard as a problem.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat, which isn__ really there. And the definition of a theologian is he__ somebody who finds it.

Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method__ore daring than anything that the history of philosophy records__f Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the medium of the most perfect exchange between us, henceforth and forever, the indestructible, the unchangeable, the universal currency of good will and peace, and this, my brothers and sisters, is a currency that is not interchangeable with silver and gold, it is a currency of the heart, of the good life, of the highest estate on the earth.

As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher.

Do not drown yourself into fantasy, whatever you can do, do it now, do not wait for tomorrow to come.

Do a bit research before you plan.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

There is a present because it works with my theories. If you find a better one than mine, then I may reconsider, but for the sake of the universe__nd oh, how we philosophers make the universe weep__here is a present, and it is the time you just left.

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution__nresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand__t burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage__t last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.

Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture.

Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.

Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.