Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Quotes

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody's answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

I've deliberately studied many things that I know, going in, I won't be able to assimilate. I read Plato, St. Thomas, the mystics, to exercise my mind.

It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

The brainy class is made up of individuals who think for themselves and beyond formal education are continuous learners who tend to be self-taught.

The specious figments of genius, and the erratic flights of philosophy, may excite our wonder, but they cannot stand the ordeal of scrutiny, or the Lydian touch of experiment.

I've always been into asking the big questions; I'm the last guy out the door at closing time cuz I was sittin' around 'til the wee hours with the other ones who were asking the same things.

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

To a philosopher no circumstance, however trifling, is too minute.

An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.

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

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.

Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.