Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Brookner, Anita

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

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

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

Diderot, Denis

10.

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

11.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

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

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

Burroughs, John

15.

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

16.

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

James, William

17.

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

Roux, Joseph

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

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

Rohn, Jim

23.

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

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Lippmann, Walter

27.

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

28.

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

Murdoch, Iris

29.

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

Descartes, Rene

30.

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

31.

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

Stevens, Wallace

32.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

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

34.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

35.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

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

37.

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

Yeats, William Butler

38.

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

Marx, Karl

39.

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

40.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

41.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

Miller, Henry

44.

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

45.

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

Stevens, Wallace

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

50.

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