philosophical mindset Quotes

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things... It doesn't frighten me.

The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.

I'm a thinker not a talker.

... when confronted with unusual life situations... A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value.

A philosopher is a man who can look at an empty glass with a smile.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn.

'But the man who is ready to taste every form of knowledge, is glad to learn and never satisfied - he's the man who deserves to be called a philosopher, isn't he?'

I guess I was a philosophical child.

I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.

I feel lucky, happy and philosophical about it all.

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

Some people are destined to be deep thinkers. I am not one of those people.

I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.

A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events?

To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

Earnsha was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.