Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

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

Berkeley, George

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Rohn, Jim

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Voltaire

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say thus it shall be!, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past -- they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their knowing is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is -- will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity.

Sagan, Carl Edward

12.

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

13.

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

15.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Socrates

16.

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

Stevens, Wallace

17.

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

Lippmann, Walter

18.

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

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.

Descartes, Rene

21.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

22.

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

Diderot, Denis

23.

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

Brookner, Anita

24.

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

Burroughs, John

25.

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

Russell, Bertrand

26.

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

Gauguin, Paul

27.

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

28.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

29.

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

Murdoch, Iris

30.

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

Pinter, Harold

31.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Seneca

34.

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

James, William

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

Zend, Robert

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Popper, Karl

40.

If you set your heart upon philosophy, you must straightway prepare yourself to be laughed at and mocked by many who will say Behold a philosopher arisen among us! or How came you by that brow of scorn? But do you cherish no scorn, but hold to those things which seem to you the best, as one set by God in that place. Remember too, that if you abide in those ways, those who first mocked you, the same shall afterwards reverence you; but if you yield to them, you will be laughed at twice as much as before.

Epictetus

41.

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

Edwards, Oliver

42.

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

43.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

46.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

47.

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

48.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.

Reade, W. Winwood

49.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Whitehead, Alfred North

50.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt