Shannon Lee Quotes

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge. ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

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 men.

Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing or even reading long, dense books. In fact, it is something men and women of action use - and have used throughout history - to solve their problems and achieve their greatest triumphs. Not in the classroom but on the battlefield, in the forum, and at court.

I have often said that philosophy is better at questions than at answers – and that's nontrivial. They don't think it's their job to understand how things actually work, whereas I think that should be the job of philosophers.

I see the beard and cloak, but I don't yet see a philosopher. -Video barbam et pallium; philosophum nondum video

Some of my understanding of what philosophy and ethics is has changed very slowly. One thing that has changed is this for quite a long time I bought-into the idea that philosophy is basically about arguments. I'm increasingly of the view that it isn't. The most interesting things in philosophy aren't arguments. The thing that I think is underestimated is what I call a form of attending. I think that philosophy is at least as much about carefully attending to things as it is about the structure of arguments.

Philosophy is everybody's business.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

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.

The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things.

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).

Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.

The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.