Philosophy quotes

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Hell is other people.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

I have wondered about time all my life.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.