Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about 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

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

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

Zend, Robert

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Camus, Albert

10.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

Canetti, Elias

11.

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

12.

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

Miller, Henry

13.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

14.

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

15.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

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

17.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

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

19.

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

Stevens, Wallace

20.

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

Carnegie, Dale

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

23.

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

Yeats, William Butler

24.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

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

Descartes, Rene

29.

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

Stevens, Wallace

30.

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

Roux, Joseph

31.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

32.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

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

34.

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

Lippmann, Walter

35.

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

Hegel, Georg

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Diderot, Denis

39.

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

James, William

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

Popper, Karl

46.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

47.

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

48.

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

49.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

50.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.