Philosophy

Hobbes

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius begin by acknowledging his indebtedness to his grandfather, father, adopted father, various teachers, and the gods … He owes it to the gods … that when he took to philosophy he did not waste time on history, syllogism or astronomy.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) A History of Western Philosophy, chapter XXVIII, 271.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) Hamlet, I, v, 166.

For there was never yet philosopher,
That could endure the toothache patiently
— William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Much Ado About Nothing, V, i, 35-36.

These men will spend their lives, ‘tis odd!
Inventing nicknames for their God.
— Sir John Squire (1884 – 1958), ‘On metaphysicians’, Collected Poems, Macmillan, 1959, 211.

Physical philosophers are ever enquiring whence things are, not why; referring them to nature, not to mind; and thus they tend to make a system a substitute for God.
— John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890), Religion and Science.

The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry; because men seldom allot themselves half the time they should do; but, fixing on a day for their return, post from place to place, rather as if they were on a journey that required dispatch, than as philosophers investigating the works of nature.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXVI.

Positivistic science, Marxism included, offers a variety of scientific explanations for this phenomenon [accepting Marxism], but instead of eliminating the mystery, they tend rather to deepen it. For the cold ‘objective’ reason that speaks to us from these explanations in fact only underlines the disproportion between itself — a power that claims to be the decisive one in this civilisation — and the mass insanity that has nothing in common with any form of rationality.
— Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright (and later president), ‘Thriller’ in Living in Truth, Faber 1989, 160.

Nor is the philosopher less free from the absurdities of sympathetic magic, such as wearing a lion's claw to make one brave. Thus the wearing of diamonds, emeralds, and yellow topaz comforts and exhilarates, rings of seahorses' teeth worn on the fingers prevent cramp, the root of the peony tied to the neck cures the falling sickness and the nightmare, little bladders of quicksilver or tablets of arsenic are to be worn as preservatives against plague, being poisons themselves, they draw venom to them from the spirits.
— Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Natural History in Ten Centuries c. 1626.

The insect I am now describing lived three years; every year it changed its skin, and got a new set of legs. I have sometimes plucked off a leg, which grew again in two or three days. At first it dreaded my approach to its web; but at last it became so familiar as to take a fly out of my hand, and upon my touching any part of the web, would immediately leave its hole, prepared either for defence or an attack.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774), ‘The Philosopher and the Spider’, in Animated Nature.

Two particular uses of crystals in electronics are favourites with the New Age philosophers as examples of crystals being somehow ‘attuned’ to the universe: crystal radios and quartz watches. (It should be noted here that the crystals are composed of silicon dioxide, and are not the same as the silicon of a silicon chip.) The association between crystals and frequencies (and hence tuning) is quoted as demonstrating that crystals can be used to ‘tune you in’ to energy, like a radio.
— Richard Chirgwin, The Skeptic, vol. 8, No. 3, Spring 1988.

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