Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

- Roux, Joseph

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

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

Miller, Henry

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Murdoch, Iris

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

10.

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

Roux, Joseph

11.

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

Stevens, Wallace

12.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

Burroughs, John

17.

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

18.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

22.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

23.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

Donne, John

24.

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

25.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

26.

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

Hegel, Georg

27.

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

James, William

28.

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

29.

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

Stevens, Wallace

30.

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

31.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

32.

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

Russell, Bertrand

33.

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

34.

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

Berkeley, George

35.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

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

Brookner, Anita

38.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

Gauguin, Paul

41.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

42.

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

Camus, Albert

43.

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

44.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

45.

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Rohn, Jim

49.

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

Yeats, William Butler

50.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.