The Enlightenment By Philosophers Quotes

1. "Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth"
Author: Andrew Carnegie

2. "But when, from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: 'Here I stand; I can no other,' a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment, everything was made plain to her. She felt instantly that she understood the meaning of life - as far as it concerned her. Amazing to see clearly for the first time. Now everything was explained. How simple it was for her to realize that she herself was the centre of her own universe. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence."
Author: Anna Kavan

3. "The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall"
Author: Cormac McCarthy

4. "The Bible and several other self help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful... or fun for that matter."
Author: Dave Mustaine

5. "If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance."
Author: David Berlinski

6. "O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee , has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty . how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring)"
Author: E.E. Cummings

7. "The Olympian vice.--In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'---Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter---right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion---and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

8. "With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime."
Author: Herman Wouk

9. "The essence of enlightenment … is a big understanding, which gives you a deep and wide perspective to see the world as a whole, and a capacity to accept with compassion all that is. 11/26"
Author: Ilchi Lee

10. "Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1)."
Author: John D. Caputo

11. "Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power."
Author: Jon Meacham

12. "The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."
Author: M. H. Abrams

13. "Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival."
Author: Michael Shermer

14. "It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things."
Author: Nick Harkaway

15. "There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands."
Author: Plato

16. "Remember what one of our philosophers once said, 'In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, such that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another."
Author: Richard Castle

17. "As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s."
Author: Robert Darnton

18. "The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale."
Author: Rufus Wainwright

19. "Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference."
Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

20. "In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters."
Author: Yoshida Kenkō

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