Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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 and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about 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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Seneca

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

Carnegie, Dale

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

Descartes, Rene

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

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.

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

12.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

13.

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

Gauguin, Paul

14.

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

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Roux, Joseph

18.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

20.

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

21.

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

Pinter, Harold

22.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

26.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

30.

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

31.

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

Edwards, Oliver

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

Zend, Robert

37.

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

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

41.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

42.

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

43.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

44.

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

45.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

49.

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

Burroughs, John

50.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Aquinas, St. Thomas