Karl Popper Quotes

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

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

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water

It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.'

The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.

I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.