Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

- Voltaire

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

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

Stevens, Wallace

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

10.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

12.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

13.

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

Descartes, Rene

14.

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

15.

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

Stevens, Wallace

16.

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

17.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

18.

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

Berkeley, George

19.

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

20.

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

21.

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

Lippmann, Walter

22.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

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

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

James, William

27.

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

28.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists -- in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

29.

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

30.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

31.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

32.

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

33.

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

Edwards, Oliver

34.

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

Burroughs, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

38.

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

39.

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

Yeats, William Butler

40.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

41.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

45.

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

Roux, Joseph

46.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

47.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

Carnegie, Dale

49.

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

50.

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