Quotes by Philosophers - Page 365

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.
Plato
Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Lao Tzu
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
Confucius
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
John Dewey
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
Mary Midgley
Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?
Socrates
Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Rabindranath Tagore
The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
Plato
I have forgotten my umbrella.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Eric Hoffer
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Karl R. Popper
No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity
Seneca
All things fade and quickly turn to myth.
Marcus Aurelius
He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
Diogenes of Sinope
I am a citizen of the world.
Diogenes of Sinope
the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
Francis Bacon
Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.
Immanuel Kant
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.
Albert Camus
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.
Jostein Gaarder
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.
Epictetus
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek
The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.
Thomas Aquinas
I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.
Albert Camus
She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
Ayn Rand
I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.
Jostein Gaarder
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
Robert M. Pirsig
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
Guy Debord
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
Plato
All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.
Edmund Husserl
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
Francis Bacon
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
John Rawls
A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.
Peter Kreeft
Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
René Descartes
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
Epictetus
Don't fear the gods,Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.
Epicurus
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Søren Kierkegaard
Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
Albert Camus
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,'said the dewdrop to the lake.
Rabindranath Tagore
Pactum serva" - "Keep the faith
Horace
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
Sam Harris
As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.
Lao Tzu
Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.(There is no reality except in action.)
Jean-Paul Sartre
Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.
Aristotle