Motivational Quotes

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

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

James, William

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

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

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

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

Stevens, Wallace

10.

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

Camus, Albert

11.

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

Edwards, Oliver

12.

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

13.

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

14.

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

Carnegie, Dale

15.

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

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

Pascal, Blaise

20.

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

21.

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

Miller, Henry

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

25.

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

Hegel, Georg

26.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

27.

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

Rohn, Jim

28.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Descartes, Rene

35.

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

36.

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

39.

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

Roux, Joseph

40.

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

41.

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

Pinter, Harold

42.

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

43.

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

Seneca

44.

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

Stevens, Wallace

45.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

46.

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

47.

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

Russell, Bertrand

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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.