Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

- Quinet, Edgar

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

Hegel, Georg

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Zend, Robert

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Diogenes of Sinope

10.

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

Gauguin, Paul

11.

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

Lippmann, Walter

12.

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

Rohn, Jim

13.

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

14.

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

Carnegie, Dale

15.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

17.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

18.

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

19.

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

Roux, Joseph

20.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

Smith, Sydney

24.

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

25.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

27.

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.

28.

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

James, William

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

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

Marx, Karl

35.

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

36.

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

Murdoch, Iris

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

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

42.

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

Miller, Henry

43.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

45.

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

Murdoch, Iris

46.

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

Seneca

47.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.

Rorty, Richard