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Philosophy Art Quotes

75 art quotes about Philosophy | Submit more Philosophy art quotes

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. (M. H. Abrams)

Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. (Henry Brooks Adams)

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored. (Leon Battista Alberti)

Philosophy is a study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently. (Anonymous)

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. (St. Thomas Aquinas)

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. (Sir Francis Bacon)

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. (Ambrose Bierce)

Philosophy is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat which isn't there. (Lord Bowen)

Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work with mastery. Like the moon, come out from behind the clouds! Shine. (Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha)

There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others. (Samuel Butler, novelist)

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. (Albert Camus)

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand. (Elias Canetti)

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. (Yu Cao)

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable. (Anton Chekhov)

You belittle the man in his work when you accept his skill, his sensitivity in patterning, in building forms, his finesse in accenting, his suavity in technique, but reflect his philosophy, his background. People do this through fear or incapacity to accept life. Without the philosophy, or in other words the man, in the work of any great artist, you have nothing. (Lisa Christensen)

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers. (John Churton Collins)

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments? (John Constable)

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity. (Daniel Dennett)

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another. (Rene Descartes)

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy. (Ernest Dimnet)

The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, / The Element of fire is quite put out; / The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit / Can well direct him where to look for it. (John Donne)

I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in. (Oliver Edwards)

I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, 'You can't fall off the floor.' And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one. (Michael Eisner)

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things. (Epictetus)

Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy. (Naum Gabo)

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty? (Paul Gauguin)

When a philosopher says something that is true, then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial, then it is false. (Karl Freiderich Gauss)

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why. (Eric Gill)

To a philosopher no circumstance, however trifling, is too minute. (Oliver Goldsmith)

I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there actually are in heaven and earth. (Nelson Goodman)

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. (Stephen Jay Gould)

Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy. (Sydney J. Harris)

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. (Stephen Hawking)

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. (Victor Hugo)

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run. (Charles F. Kettering)

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought? (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness. (Dalai Lama)

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. (Suzanne Langer)

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. (Timothy Leary)

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers. (Walter Lippmann)

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. (W. Somerset Maugham)

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. (H. L. Mencken)

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. (Ludwig von Mises)

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. (Iris Murdoch)

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions. (Martha Nussbaum)

Philosophers are never happy here. Now is not their time, and here is not their space. They live there, they live somewhere else. (Osho)

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher; and philosophy begins in wonder. (Plato)

The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. (Plato)

Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers (lovers of wisdom), and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits. (Pythagoras)

All work is an act of philosophy. (Ayn Rand)

It is our philosophical set of the sail that determines the course of our lives. To change our current direction, we have to change our philosophy not our circumstances. (Jim Rohn)

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors. (Jim Rohn)

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true. (George Santayana)

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker. (Charles Schulz)

I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time. (Charles Schulz)

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (William Shakespeare)

Philosophy begins with wonder. (Socrates)

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion. (Baruch Spinoza)

It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. (Henry David Thoreau)

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates... simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. (Henry David Thoreau)

Astonishment is the root of philosophy. (Paul Tillich)

History should be written as philosophy. (Voltaire)

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning. (Alfred North Whitehead)

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it. (Alfred North Whitehead)

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn. (Oscar Wilde)

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known (which included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Andre Derain and Maurice Vlaminck among others) had a philosophical culture. (Semir Zeki)


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Editor: Robert Genn

Assistant Editor: Shawn Jackson

Associate Editors:

Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Sara Genn, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,
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Last modified: June 20, 2013