Quotes on Philosophy

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

My definition (of a philosopher) is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.

America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments.

In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.

In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.

I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.

Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.