Brandon Sanderson Quotes

Nothing is too absurd to be said by some of the philosophers.

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

Philosophy is everybody's business.

Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.

The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair.

There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human"?

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

In the first place a philosophical proposition must be general. It must not deal specially with things on the surface of the earth, or within the solar system, or with any other portion of space and time. . . . This brings us to a second characteristic of philosophical propositions, namely that they must be a priori. A philosophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved nor disproved by empirical evidence. . . . Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from logic as that word has now come to be used.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

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?

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

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.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.