Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

- Dickens, Charles

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Pinter, Harold

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

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

James, William

10.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

11.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

12.

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

13.

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

Zend, Robert

14.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

15.

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

16.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

21.

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

Yeats, William Butler

22.

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

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.

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

Roux, Joseph

25.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

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

Berkeley, George

27.

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

Seneca

28.

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

Stevens, Wallace

29.

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

30.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

31.

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

Camus, Albert

32.

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

Gauguin, Paul

33.

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

Rohn, Jim

34.

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

35.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

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

37.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

38.

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

Marx, Karl

39.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

41.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

42.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

43.

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

44.

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

Voltaire

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.

Bergerac, Savinien Cyrano De

48.

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

Pascal, Blaise

49.

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

Russell, Bertrand

50.

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