Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

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

Hegel, Georg

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

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Pinter, Harold

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Diderot, Denis

10.

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

11.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

12.

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Brookner, Anita

13.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

15.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

Carnegie, Dale

17.

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

18.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

19.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

20.

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

Stevens, Wallace

21.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

22.

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

Russell, Bertrand

23.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

24.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

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

Zend, Robert

30.

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

Burroughs, John

31.

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

Murdoch, Iris

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

36.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

37.

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

Murdoch, Iris

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Edwards, Oliver

41.

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

Gauguin, Paul

42.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Lippmann, Walter

44.

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

Seneca

45.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

46.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Camus, Albert

50.

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

Marx, Karl