Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

- Shaw, George Bernard

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

Roux, Joseph

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Edwards, Oliver

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

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

Carnegie, Dale

10.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

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

Pinter, Harold

14.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

17.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

18.

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

19.

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

Miller, Henry

20.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

25.

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

26.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

Stein, Gertrude

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

33.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

34.

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

Berkeley, George

35.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

36.

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

Burroughs, John

37.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

38.

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

Rohn, Jim

39.

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

Marx, Karl

40.

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

Descartes, Rene

41.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

44.

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

James, William

45.

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

Stevens, Wallace

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

49.

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

50.

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

Murdoch, Iris