John Donne Quotes

I am not very smart, but I recognize that I am not very smart.

Though man a thinking being is defined, Few use the grand prerogative of mind. How few think justly of the thinking few! How many never think, who think they do!

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

By the sole fact of his entering into 'Thought,' man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.

Alcmaeon was the first to define the difference between man and animals, saying that man differs from the latter in the fact that he alone has the power of understanding.

Thought is the thought of thought.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason; there is nothing more excellent than the universe, therefore the universe exercises reason.

I think, therefore I am confused.

The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself.

I have this real moron thing I do? It's called thinking.

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

Reason is the most active human faculty.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

We are not distinguished from brutes by our senses, but by our understanding.

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not.

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.