Philosophy Quotes

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

Samuel Johnson

Actual philosophers ... are commanders and law-givers: they say

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy is doubt.

Michel de Montaigne

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.

Giambattista Vico

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.

George Bernard Shaw

Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

Sara Teasdale

The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.

Blaise Pascal

When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

Paulo Coelho

That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.

Mark Twain

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house

Virginia Woolf

There are only two kinds of people we can call reasonable: either those who serve God with their whole heart because they know him, or those who search after him with all their heart because they do not know him.

Blaise Pascal

I don't plan to die for any cause, said Jim Bowie. Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain't noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.

Orson Scott Card

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Bertrand Russell

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Charles Dickens

Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who areof a certain nature; he who is not, not.

Plato

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

Albert Camus

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

Bertrand Russell

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Thomas Jefferson

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Bertrand Russell

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.

Albert Camus