A History of Western Philosophy

„To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.”

„True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date.”

„Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party. Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”

„Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”

„In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude.”

„The certain truth there is no man who knows, nor ever shall be, about the gods and all the things whereof I speak.”

„You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”

„The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.”

„No two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds.”

„When you recollect, the recollection occurs now, and is not identical with the event recollected.”

„The conception of purpose, therefore, is only applicable within reality, not to reality as a whole.”

„It is only between what is right and what seems right from habit that some people are mad enough to see no difference.”

„It is the events that are the stuff of the world, and each of them is of brief duration.”

„The disbelief in objective truth makes the majority, for practical purposes, the arbiters as to what to believe.”

„One of the defects of all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they already know the conclusions to be reached.”

„A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.”

„The easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves.”

„The problem of finding a collection of „wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.”

„Where there is vigour, there is a tendency to overstep just bounds; hence arises strife.”

„The desire remains mine even when what is desired has no reference to myself.”

„For my part, I have found that, when I wish to write a book on some subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then, some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole, with all its parts duly interrelated.”

„What seems like sudden insight may be misleading, and must be tested soberly when the divine intoxication has passed.”

„Any attempt to divide the world into portions, of which one is more „real” than the other, is doomed to failure.”

„What is timeless must be uncreated.”

„Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.”

„A holy man in India or Tibet needs no apparatus, wears only a loin cloth, eats only rice, and is supported by very meagre charity because he is thought wise.”

„Motion demands that a given thing A should be now here, now there; it must remain the same thing while it moves.”

„Contempt for happiness is easier when the happiness is other people's.”

„Evolution is not primarily explicable by adaptation to environment; adaptation is rather a result of evolution.”