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If you're a doctor, what do you promise to do? First, do no harm. If your operating philosophy is do no harm, that's not a call to imagination. Not only that, if I'm a patient, I don't want your imagination. I want what works.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)
When you're in the muck, you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck, but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things, too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.
Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.
Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.
Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.
I know that in the battle of ideas, Republican politicians are at a distinct disadvantage. Their fundamental philosophy - which I characterize as survival of the fittest, richest and whitest - is too callous for most Americans.
The only problem that occurs in the practice of tantra is when you don't practice tantra and fool yourself. You get caught up in powerful vortexes of negative energy which pull you into the lower bardo regions ... into the mud.
Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA
Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
When we begin to look around us, to observe individuals and societies, and to study philosophies and religions, we realize that our loneliness is shared. Our solitude is plural, and our singularity is the similarity between us.
For me the starting point for everything - before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience - is work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude, you're dead in the water.
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
In my political philosophy - which is definitely more socialist Democrat than centrist politician like Hillary Clinton - I think regulation for banks and those platforms that Bernie Sanders had are good for the whole of America.
Cancer taught me to stop saving things for a special occasion. Every day is special. You don't have to get cancer to start living life to the fullest. My post-cancer philosophy? No wasted time. No ugly clothes. No boring movies.
There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.
In tantra one does not seek experiences that most people would consider unspiritual and try to see truth in them. In tantra we don't try to guide our life in a specific way. We let the winds of existence blow us where they will.
Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.
The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
There are things that I would avoid, so I have the choice to say no, when I feel I'm repeating myself too much. But then there could be a reason to do that with a good director. So I think actors have to have a loose philosophy.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.
Building a successful company (or living a happy life, for that matter) is not about embracing someone else's philosophy, but staying true to your own beliefs about the world and learning from the mistakes you make along the way.
The divine element manifests itself (or show up) in man as well by his aptitude for science, than by his aptitude for virtue. True morality, true philosophy and true art are in their essence ("dans leur essence", Fr.) religious."
The precepts of philosophy and of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. (Jesus) pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man, erected his tribunal in the regions of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.
Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.
Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.
Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know.
The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it.......Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
I had more energy at 50. On the other hand, at 75, I've probably got a little more wisdom and good judgment than I had at 50 because I've got more experience. But I haven't really changed. I'm still driven by the same philosophy.
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
I try to teach people to continually search and question the meaning of everything they are taught and everything they believe in. My job is not so much to impart a philosophy but to train people in the methods of self-discovery.
To derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy.
Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.
The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.