Philip Sidney Quotes

History should be written as philosophy.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

And seek for truth in the groves of Academy

That's one thing I learned in my philosophy training - if you're writing a paper on Aristotle, you have to first show that you understand him. Then you can make your counterargument.

I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.

Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?

I read all the great philosophers but most people just hear what they want to hear and it makes it easy for them to brand us devil worshippers.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.

... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?

In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.