Philosophy quotes

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

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

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.