Werner Heisenberg Quotes

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha. Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

I was reading Plato's 'The Republic' at age 18, and I can't account fully the electricity that had for me.

I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.

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'm interested in philosophy, I studied it, and I also admit I try to read things that are way above me. I have a limit: I take what I need from it, and I do find that some of my favourite philosophical writings tend to be poppier. I admire smart people who are able to describe things simply or in a human, readable way.

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

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.