philosophers-from-france

"You have given me perfection of sensitivity, quickness of intelligence, strength of memory; you have given me the ability to express myself fluently, to present my thoughts pleasantly, to teach convincingly, to carry out my intentions, to behave pleasantly, to progress in my studies, to achieve my projects; you have given me comfort in adversity, caution in happy circumstances."

"O my soul, what do you think that sweet and gentle thing is, which devout souls usually feel and taste when they remember their beloved, and which usually enamours them so sweetly that they seem to be alienated and out of themselves? They feel joyful and glad in their consciences and forget all their pain: their soul rejoices, their intellect becomes clear, their heart is illuminated, their will becomes joyful."

"Tell me, I beg you, what – among all things – has become the one thing for you, the thing you want to embrace in a unique way and enjoy forever."

"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum. Coartata scientia iucunda non est."

"This sensible world […] is almost like a book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine virtue, and individual creatures are like figures, not invented by human arbitrariness, but established by divine will to manifest the invisible wisdom of God. [...] It is therefore good to contemplate assiduously and admire divine works."

"Of all the things to seek, the first is wisdom, in which lies the form of perfect goodness."

"Love seems to be the satisfaction of a person's heart towards something, because of something: it presents itself as desire in the search, and happiness in the satisfaction of possession; it appears as a race, as far as desire is concerned, and as rest, as far as the joy of possession is concerned."

"When asked about the best conditions for learning, a scholar replied: “A humble spirit, commitment to research, a quiet life, silent inquiry, poverty, a foreign land; these circumstances make it easier to overcome the difficulties encountered during one's studies”. :*From Didascalicon."

"Wisdom enlightens human beings so that they may recognise themselves."

"(About the Assumption of Mary) She who was conceived without spot and borne without pain, who became mother without loss of virginity, who placed God in the world, who died without suffering, was also preserved from corruption; and we believe she lives in heaven with her body. It is piously believed."

"Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est; fortis autem iam, cui omne solum patria est; perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exsilium est."

"In retailing slander, we name the originator, in order to enjoy a pleasure without danger."

"Jealousy is the homage that inferiority pays to merit."

"Men are so unjust that to be unhappy is to be wrong."

"The prejudices of men emanate from the mind, and may be overcome; the prejudices of women emanate from the heart, and are impregnable."

"Would you know how to give? Put yourself in the place of him who receives."

"A woman whose great beauty eclipses all others is seen with as many different eyes as there are people who look at her. Pretty women gaze with envy, homely women with spite, old men with regret, young men with transport."

"Constraint is the mother of desires."

"A great name without merit is like an epitaph on a coffin."

"One seeks new friends only when too well known by old ones."

"Above all, [Félix Ravaisson] was a writer. He expressed himself in broad, flexible, simple and wise phrases, elegant and solid with an air of abandon, and the logical relationships between ideas and the aesthetic harmony that coordinates them and the creative action that brings forth the details, conditions and elements from the whole and from the beginning. His style is the very soul grasped in his inner life and in the secret movement through which it gives itself and spreads. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"For many years, the clergy of the parish of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont cherished the memory of that pale teenager, who never missed divine services and zealously fulfilled all religious practices. In turn, Boutroux never forgot the church of his first communion, the church where his spirit had been nourished and strengthened in those religious convictions that were to form the basis and crowning glory of his philosophical views. As an adult, he returned there more than once to recall the sweet memories of his younger years and to meditate at the tomb of Blaise Pascal."

"Pascal contrasts the objects of mathematics with other objects that are completely different, which he does not group under a common name, but merely enumerates and describes, although it is easy to recognise what he might have called, if he had had the language of his time, things of an aesthetic and moral nature; and at the same time he characterises with precise features the faculties of the mind to which these two kinds of objects respectively belong. No one else, in fact, had a clearer awareness of the difference between the two orders of things and faculties, whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit; no one else had such a correct and vivid sense of the special nature of the two orders, and knew their consequences so well. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 144)"

"The whole person of Ravaisson was the manifestation of one unique thing: his intimate union of thought and heart with spiritual and eternal realities. Deep down, he did not believe in death because he was convinced that what passes away has its being only in what remains. He saw things and people not only in their ideas, like Plato, but in their source, which is infinite love, superior to the Idea and unfailing. He not only professed his doctrine with conviction, but lived it. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"Boutroux [...] believes he is criticising science, but instead he criticises a puppet of formal logic, as if the logical power of thought were exhausted in the principle of identity, A is A; but conversely, he establishes a dogmatism worse than the scientific one (because it is philosophical) by considering all reality as a posteriori of experience. (Guido De Ruggiero, La filosofia contemporanea, Editori Laterza, Bari, 19648, part II, Ch. IV, p. 192)"

"A philosopher is a man who compares the knowledge and beliefs of men in order to investigate their relationships; therefore, we want to know how Plato or Leibniz conceived these relationships; Furthermore, since a philosopher is not a seer to whom truth is revealed in a flash, but a patient researcher who reflects, criticises, doubts, hesitates, and surrenders only to obvious reasons, we want to know by what methodical means, by what observations and reasoning our author arrived at his conclusions. For this is not a matter of unconscious and mechanical work of his brain, but of a conscious and deliberate effort to overcome the limits of his own personality, to think universally, and to discover the truth. (Ch. I, p. 7)"

"Scientific laws, says Boutroux, result from the collaboration of the spirit and things; they are the product of the activity of the spirit applied to a foreign matter; and they represent the effort that the spirit makes to establish a coincidence between things and itself. But what coincidence is this, where it is not known with what thought must coincide? He rightly says that the highest forms of reality cannot be resolved into the lowest; but then he resolves into the lowest... precisely thought, that is, the very thought that alone can make us understand progress from below to above. Consequently, progress is clouded in the void of contingency, and all forms of reality become things in themselves, which thought can do nothing but shadow in its concepts, trying in vain to adapt to them. (Guido De Ruggiero, La filosofia contemporanea, Editori Laterza, Bari, 19648, Part II, Ch. IV, p. 191)"

"He used to say that a philosophical system is a living thought; and, in truth, he not only taught his philosophy, but lived it, felt it, spread it and defended it in books and with words, in Europe and America, regardless of hardship, with all the ardour of a missionary."

"Mysticism consists, according to a beautiful definition I find in Plotinus], in seeing with closed eyes [...] in seeing with the eyes of the soul, while the eyes of the body are closed. The essential phenomenon of mysticism is what is called ecstasy, a state in which, with all communication with the external world interrupted, the soul has the sense of communicating with an internal object, which is the infinite being, God. (La psicologia del misticismo, pp. 58-59)"

"[...] the person of Ravaisson himself is like the act, the fulfilment of the thought which, in his written philosophy, aspires to realise itself. He immediately distinguished himself by a grace, a distinction, a smiling serenity that never disappeared. He attracted people with his good grace and impressed them with his fundamental affinity with the noble and the great. He spoke with absolute simplicity and probity, concerned only with thinking correctly and expressing his thoughts faithfully and naturally, without ever allowing a word of effect or rhetorical artifice to enter his mind. He spoke about everything and was interested in the small pleasures of the world as well as the great questions of philosophy and life. But in all things he saw the link between the ideal and the real. Like the ancient Greeks, he saw the divine in everything. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, pp. 115-116)"

"The main core around which Boutroux's thought revolves is the problem of science and the meaning of natural laws. From 1874, the year of his thesis, “De la Contingence des lois de la Nature”, until his death, i.e. for just under half a century, Boutroux developed and elaborated his critique of science, always insisting on it and basing his theories on freedom and religion on it, which form, one might say, the positive part of his philosophy. (Ugo Spirito, Il pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze, 1921, cap. II, p. 142)"

"Poor health, which worsened with the passing of the years, forced him from his youth to withdraw into himself, to seek in his own spirit the best source of joy. Few penetrated his moral intimacy. But just seeing him like that, tall, pale, thin, emaciated, it was easy to guess what a rich inner life was enclosed in that frail body, and how the world of the spirit must have been the only real world for him."

"The distinctive feature of Medieval philosophy, which reached its peak in scholasticism, is the effort to use reason to demonstrate a set of metaphysical doctrines capable of connecting, as far as possible, Hellenic philosophy of nature and Christian theology. While Greek philosophy started from the idea of a nature entirely permeated by the divine and subsequently fell due to the dissociation of these two principles, Scholasticism, for which the divine is essentially infinite personality and perfection, first radically separates God and nature and grants the latter only the attributes indispensable to a contingent existence. Nothing then prevents us from conceiving of perfect divine spirituality as coexisting with imperfect nature. Transcendent with respect to things, God is not affected by their imperfection. And the very imperfection of nature provides reason with the starting point for the arguments by which it establishes the philosophical truths implied in supernatural truths. Thus, the conditions of a natural philosophy were reconciled with those of a religious philosophy. (La scolastica, pp. 10-11)"

"In the continuous development of nature and spirit, Boutroux believes it is impossible to establish anything definitive that has eternal value. Man, therefore, who is the greatest exponent of progress, does not know what his progress is tending towards; he does not know, therefore, whether his progress is true progress. Everything disappears into the indeterminate, into confusion, and the sceptical conclusion presents itself as compelling. But no: Boutroux, like James before him, does not lose himself in negation at this point and wants to save himself from scepticism. And so negation itself is transformed into affirmation. It is precisely the indistinct, the confused that contains the reason for life: in it is love, faith, the ideal; in it is that powerful impulse that moves the poet, the artist, the scientist himself, for science would be nothing without faith. But religion thus attained is an empty religion, and the ideal thus established is an ideal that fades into nothingness. (Ugo Spirito, Il pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze, 1921, cap. II pp. 150-151)"

"Above all, [Félix Ravaisson] was a writer. He expressed himself in broad, flexible, simple and wise phrases, elegant and solid with an air of abandon, and the logical relationships between ideas and the aesthetic harmony that coordinates them and the creative action that brings forth the details, conditions and elements from the whole and from the beginning. His style is the very soul grasped in his inner life and in the secret movement through which it gives itself and spreads. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"The whole person of Ravaisson was the manifestation of one unique thing: his intimate union of thought and heart with spiritual and eternal realities. Deep down, he did not believe in death because he was convinced that what passes away has its being only in what remains. He saw things and people not only in their ideas, like Plato, but in their source, which is infinite love, superior to the Idea and unfailing. He not only professed his doctrine with conviction, but lived it. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"[...] the history of philosophy deals with the doctrines conceived by philosophers, not philosophy in general in its entirety, nor the psychological evolution of each thinker in particular; therefore, its essential task, to which all others are subordinate, consists in penetrating and understanding doctrines, explaining them as well as possible, as the author himself would do, and presenting them in accordance with the spirit and, to a certain extent, the style of their author. (Ch. I, pp. 7-8)"

"Socrates' condemnation of ancient physics has its root cause in the ideas inherent in his own nation. Greece could not fully identify with the speculations on the principles of things to which the physiologists had gone. Without doubt, the power of reasoning, the ingenious subtlety, and the marvellous sense of harmony employed by these profound investigators were its heritage; but the immediate application of these spiritual qualities to material objects so foreign to man was contrary to the genius of an essentially political race, especially fond of fine words and fine deeds. (Ch. II, p. 22)"

"[...] the person of Ravaisson himself is like the act, the fulfilment of the thought which, in his written philosophy, aspires to realise itself. He immediately distinguished himself by a grace, a distinction, a smiling serenity that never disappeared. He attracted people with his good grace and impressed them with his fundamental affinity with the noble and the great. He spoke with absolute simplicity and probity, concerned only with thinking correctly and expressing his thoughts faithfully and naturally, without ever allowing a word of effect or rhetorical artifice to enter his mind. He spoke about everything and was interested in the small pleasures of the world as well as the great questions of philosophy and life. But in all things he saw the link between the ideal and the real. Like the ancient Greeks, he saw the divine in everything. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, pp. 115-116)"

"An attempt has been made to prove, by means of selected passages from Pascal's Pensées, an apology for Christianity which he left in draft form, that by sacrificing reason to faith he denied the possibility of all philosophy. I propose to show, not as others seem to have done successfully, that Pascal was not a sceptic, but that in his “'Pensées”' there are, if not a system comparable in scope and detail to those of Descartes, of a Spinoza, a Malebranche or a Leibniz, at least the ideas that constitute the principles of a true philosophy. I propose to show equally that these ideas are in perfect agreement with Pascal's beliefs, and that there is no reason to be surprised by them, because there are none more suitable for harmonising, and even intimately uniting, Christianity and philosophy in their highest parts. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 131)"

"Leibniz noted that things can be compared either in terms of what one contains of the other, which is to compare them by their quantity, or in terms of their similarity to one another, which is to compare them by their qualities. To reduce a question of measurement to a question of order or arrangement is therefore to move from the point of view of quantity to that of quality, to move from a lower genus, where deduction is appropriate, to a higher genus, where only intuition has a place [...]. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 153)"

"Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantum humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea."

"For a Christian, what we call life is a preparation for what we call the “afterlife”, the other life."

"Paul VI told me that the prayer he recited every morning was: “My God, call me back to You, call me back to You, I can't take it anymore”. I believe that all popes recite this prayer, even John Paul II."

"If the Church has sometimes been against science, the cause lies in its misreading of the Bible."

"The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”."

"I believe in God because of encounters. All explanations are useless; I believe in encounters."

"The atheist confirms faith. And like a guinea pig that confirms my thesis or my faith in God."

"I find that at twent it is easy to be a hero, a saint, an extraordinary man. I believe, however, that at ninety it is very difficult to live up to the moment."

"Every segment of time shines, even if it is finite. It takes death, conversion, or interruption for us to understand any fragment of our lives."