Philosophy Quotes

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.

Kurt Vonnegut

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.

Katherine Tait

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

Oscar Wilde

It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.

Henry David Thoreau

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

Stephen King

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

Walter Lippmann

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy

Kahlil Gibran

let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.

Plato

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

George Orwell

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.

Friedrich Nietzsche

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their footsteps.

Victor Hugo

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wjpeck/mathesis.pdf

William J. Peck

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

Henry David Thoreau

The great critic...must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing

The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.

Friedrich Nietzsche