Philosophy Quotes

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

Travel is never a matter of money but of courage

Paulo Coelho

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

Plato

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Albert Einstein

Philosophy is a study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently.

Anon.

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Experience by itself proves nothing. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.

C.S. Lewis

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Plato

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

Albert Camus

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

Albert Camus

...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

Plato

If you set your heart upon philosophy, you must straightway prepare yourself to be laughed at and mocked by many who will say Behold a philosopher arisen among us! or How came you by that brow of scorn? But do you cherish no scorn, but hold to those things which seem to you the best, as one set by God in that place. Remember too, that if you abide in those ways, those who first mocked you, the same shall afterwards reverence you; but if you yield to them, you will be laughed at twice as much as before.

Epictetus

Philosophers call God the great unknown The great misknown is more like it!

Joseph Roux

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. - Mr. Knightley

Jane Austen

When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

George Bernard Shaw

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.

Bertrand Russell

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Christopher Hitchens