Philosophy quotes

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

The truth is lived, not taught.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

Truth is a pathless land.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

To live is to think.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Real living is living for others.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

The art is long, life is short.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Information is not knowledge.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.