Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
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It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at the first began to philosophize.
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No opinion, however absurd and incredible, can be imagined, which has not been maintained by some one of the philosophers.
-- René Descartes, A Discourse on Method
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What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Die Unzeitgemassen
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[T]he philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means…it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
-- William James, Pragmatism
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… the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
-- Bertrand Russell, Lectures on Logical Atomism
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Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
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The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
-- Wilfrid Sellars, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man
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The philosopher's task differs from [that of the scientist], then, in detail; but in no such drastic way as those suppose who imagine for the philosopher a vantage point outside the conceptual scheme that he takes in charge. There is no such cosmic exile.
--Willard van Orman Quine, Word and Object