Philosophy quotes

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

To be is to do.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

Life is wasted on the living.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Change alone is unchanging.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Use, do not abuse… neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.