Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

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

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.

Quinet, Edgar

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

Roux, Joseph

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

Zend, Robert

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

13.

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

Yeats, William Butler

14.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

15.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

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

Carnegie, Dale

17.

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

18.

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

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

20.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

30.

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

Burroughs, John

31.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

33.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

34.

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

Stevens, Wallace

35.

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

James, William

36.

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

Hegel, Georg

37.

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

38.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Dickens, Charles

39.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

40.

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

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.

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

43.

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

Pinter, Harold

44.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

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

Edwards, Oliver

47.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

48.

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

Descartes, Rene

49.

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

50.

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