Jonathan Miller Quotes

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.

The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others - were natives of Europe and America.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

In my office, I have a very beautiful marble bust of Seneca. I always have my eye on him when I'm taking phone calls. He's one of the many philosophers I've always read and admired.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Why must we be eternally on our knees before the Kants and Hugos?

Atheists are pious people.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

Philosophy is the highest music.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

Philosophy is for the few.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

I studied the Bible and philosophy in college, and I think in a certain sense that's the kind of stuff that still makes my brain work.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it

We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.

Human science and religion have kept company together and greatly assisted each other's progress in the world. I do not say that intellectual and moral qualities are in the same proportion in particular persons; but they have a great and friendly influence upon one another in societies and larger bodies.