Philosophy Quotes

There are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation.

Victor Hugo

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

Bertrand Russell

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

Jodi Picoult

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

Plato

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Never say never

Charles Dickens

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

Virginia Woolf

I would not think that philosophy and reason themselves will be man's guide in the foreseeable future; however, they will remain the most beautiful sanctuary they have always been for the select few

Albert Einstein

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

Henry David Thoreau

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Henry David Thoreau

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Aristotle

There are now a days professors of philosophy but not philosophers.

Henry David Thoreau

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

Leo Tolstoy

What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.''But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...''Life won't leave one alone as it is.

Leo Tolstoy

All the world's a stage.

William Shakespeare