Philosopher Quotes

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.

A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

The end of science is not to prove a theory, but to improve mankind.

Moderation is the secret of survival.

Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.

It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

The scenarios of biological or chemical warfare painted in detail by the American media during the months after September 11 only betray the inability of the government to determine the magnitude of the danger.

The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.

The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.

Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.

Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future.

Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists.

Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.

Manhattan... capital of the 20th century, a city that has fascinated me for more than three decades.