Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

- Leary, Timothy

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

Teasdale, Sara

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Miller, Henry

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

Diogenes of Sinope

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

10.

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.

11.

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.

Zend, Robert

12.

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

13.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

Hegel, Georg

14.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

16.

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

Lippmann, Walter

17.

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

Yeats, William Butler

18.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Murdoch, Iris

19.

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

20.

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

Russell, Bertrand

21.

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

22.

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

Burroughs, John

23.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

24.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

25.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

26.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Murdoch, Iris

27.

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

Seneca

28.

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

29.

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

Melville, Herman

30.

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

Brookner, Anita

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Twain, Mark

33.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Stevens, Wallace

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

36.

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

37.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

Feuerbach, Ludwig

41.

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

Smith, Sydney

42.

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

43.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

44.

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

45.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.

Voltaire

47.

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full and scratch where it itches.

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

48.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.