Philosophy Quotes

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ideas are the source of all things

Plato

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ludwig Feuerbach

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?

Thomas Jefferson

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

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Woody Allen

Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

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

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

G. W. F. Hegel

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

Diogenes

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Paul Gauguin

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

H. L. Mencken

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

H. L. Mencken

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

H. L. Mencken

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche