Philosophy Quotes

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

Albert Camus

we try so hard to live free, only to die and be confined to a brass prison

Onwuka Emeka

on the backdrop of eternity, time is a relatively new concept.

Onwuka Emeka

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

Plato

For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.

William Shakespeare

I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Ernest Hemingway

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Albert Camus

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

George Orwell

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Francis H. Bradley

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean even if it did build muscle whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

Christopher Hitchens

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

James Lovelock

You are ninety-eight cents' worth of cosmic star dust floating at the obscure edge of an ordinary galaxy, and yet you are the center of your own world; to friends and family, you may be precious beyond all worth. On one day, humanity seems the apex of all things beautiful, generous, mindful; another day, it seems a stupid beast.

K.C. Cole

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

Francis Bacon

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

Simone Weil

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.

John Keats

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

Ernest Dimnet, What We Live By

"Who are the true philosophers you have in mind?" he asked. "Sightseers of the truth" I answered. "That must be right, but what exactly does it mean?" he asked.

Plato

And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love , for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute , since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.

Blaise Pascal

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously

Bertrand Russell