Bagehot:-
§ "The patient philosopher, who is cautious in his positions, dubious of his data, slow in his conclusions, must fail at once. He would be investigating while he should attack, inquiring while he should speak. He could not act upon a chance; the moment of action would be gone. A sanguine and speedy intellect, ready to acquire, by its very idea all but excludes the examining, scrupulous, hesitating intellect which reflects." (Biographical Studies, p. 62.)
Blake:-
§ "In every cry of every Man ... The mind-forg'd manacles I hear." (Songs of Experience, 1794.)
Cicero:-
§ "Philosophy is the cultivation of the mental faculties; it roots out vices and prepares the mind to receive proper seed."
Dewey:-
§ "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of man."
Diderot:-
§ "The first step towards a philosophy is incredulity."
Epicurus:-
§ "To say that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it is passed and gone is like saying that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it is passed and gone."
Froude:-
§ "Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve." (Calvanism, 1877.)
Goldsmith, Oliver (1731-1774):-
§ "Philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey."
Hobbes:-
§ "Leisure is the mother of philosophy." (Leviathan.)
Holmes:-
§ "There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers." (The Professor of the Breakfast Table.)
Hume:-
§ "There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blamable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavor the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretense of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality." (An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding.)
§ "Philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected." (An Enquiry ...)
Keats:-
§ "Do not charms fly, At the mere touch of cold philosophy?"
§ "Philosophy will clip an angel's wings."
Keyser, Cassius J.:-
§ "The term philosophy signifies that which philosophers are doing... The meaning of the term is a function of two variables - time and clime." (As quoted in Mencken's Dictionary.)
Macaulay:-
§ "The ancient philosophy was a treadmill, not a path. It was made up of revolving questions, of controversies which were always beginning again. It was a contrivance for having much exertion and no progress." (In Macaulay's essay on, "Lord Bacon.")
Montaigne:-
§ "To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death."
Newton:-
§ "Philosophy is such as impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as to have to do with her." (In a letter to Edmund Halley, June 20, 1687)
Proverb:-
§ "Good health or bad makes our philosophy."
Rochefoucauld:-
§ "Philosophy triumphs easily over past, and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy."
Russell:-
§ "That man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes, his gears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all devotions, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not beyond dispute, are, yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."
§ "Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism: the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us either happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy." (What I Believe.)
Shakespeare:-
§ "Adversity's sweet milk - philosophy." (Romeo and Juliet.)
§ "There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet.)
Socrates:-
§ "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Voltaire (Philosophic Dictionary):-
§ "Without philosophy we should be little above the animals."
