Ferdinand Christian Baur Quotes

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

The context of history proved invaluable.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

There is a profound difference between information and meaning.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.