The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
The place that does Contain my books, the best companions, is To me a glorious court, where hourly I Converse with the, old sages and philosophers; And sometimes for variety, I confer With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels; Calling their victories, if unjustly got, Unto a strict account; and in my fancy, Deface their ill-plac'd statutes.
Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.
For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.
Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.
Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry.
There has certainly been a great deal of work addressing the relationship between naturalism and the first-person perspective. Quite a number of philosophers have suggested that there are features of the first-person perspective that naturalism just cannot accommodate, whether it be qualitative character, or consciousness, or simply the ability we have to think of ourselves in a distinctively first-person manner.
I believe in magic. . . There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.
Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most Ancient Mystery, that Majesty which philosophers call the first cause, but which we call our Father which art in heaven.
Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
There's no precedent for women philosophers and there's no precedence for most of the things I did.
I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.