Quotes by Philosophers - Page 367

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
Socrates
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
Harry G. Frankfurt
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesterton
I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.
Ayn Rand
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
Henry David Thoreau
If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza
The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.
Baruch Spinoza
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume
To be evenminded is the greatest virtue.Wisdom is to speakthe truth and actin keeping with its nature.
Heraclitus
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
Søren Kierkegaard
I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.
Criss Jami
All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All men by nature desire knowledge.
Aristotle
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
René Descartes
Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
Simone de Beauvoir
I am one thing, my writings are another.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because 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
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.
Alan W. Watts
Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Emil M. Cioran
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.
John Stuart Mill
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Voltaire
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
Ayn Rand
I think, therefore I'll think.
Ayn Rand
As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.
Jostein Gaarder
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
Bertrand Russell
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
Marcus Aurelius
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
Aristotle
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
Baruch Spinoza
He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing .
Epicurus
I am my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
Niccolò Machiavelli
No man was ever wise by chance
Seneca
Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
Michel de Montaigne
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
Blaise Pascal
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.
Marcus Aurelius
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
René Descartes
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
Søren Kierkegaard
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Zhuangzi
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage
Friedrich Nietzsche
Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.
Lao Tzu
The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
Marcus Aurelius
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
Baruch Spinoza
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
Heraclitus
Who is John Galt?
Ayn Rand
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
Ayn Rand