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We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.

— Étienne Gilson

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More quotes by Étienne Gilson

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it.

Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism.

The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts.

Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought.

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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back.

Cary Grant Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Étienne Gilson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.