Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

Jefferson, Thomas

I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

Edwards, Oliver

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.

Yeats, William Butler

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Gauguin, Paul

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

James, William

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Plato

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Brookner, Anita

10.

Tell me what gives a man or woman their greatest pleasure and I'll tell you their philosophy of life.

Carnegie, Dale

11.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

12.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Marx, Karl

13.

The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.

Sade, Marquis De

14.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

15.

Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair.

Tait, Katherine

16.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Diderot, Denis

18.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Pinter, Harold

19.

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.

Voltaire

20.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

Philosophers call God the great unknown The great misknown is more like it!

Roux, Joseph

22.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

23.

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.

Brooks, Mel

24.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Stevens, Wallace

25.

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

26.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Pascal, Blaise

28.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

30.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

32.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

33.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

Lippmann, Walter

34.

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.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

Russell, Bertrand

36.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

Pascal, Blaise

37.

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

39.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.

Keats, John

40.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

Weil, Simone

41.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Kant, Immanuel

42.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?

Diogenes of Sinope

43.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Berkeley, George

44.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Cicero, Marcus T.

46.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

48.

How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns.

Milton, John

49.

As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.

Erasmus, Desiderius

50.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Camus, Albert