Philosophy quotes

1363 quotes

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

Brian Eno

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Richard P. Feynman

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Helen Keller

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Aristotle

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Paulo Coelho

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Socrates

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Bob Dylan

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Jim Rohn

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Aristotle

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Mark Twain

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Albert Einstein

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Albert Schweitzer

Nature does nothing in vain.

Aristotle

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Charlie Chaplin

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Albert Camus

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Winston Churchill

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Thomas Carlyle

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Socrates

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Francis Bacon

Religions get lost as people do.

Franz Kafka

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Immanuel Kant

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Aristotle

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Hermann Hesse

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Albert Schweitzer

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Thomas Carlyle

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Albert Einstein

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Aristotle

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Benjamin Franklin

Science is but an image of the truth.

Francis Bacon

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Blaise Pascal

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Hermann Hesse

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Stephen Hawking

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Marilyn Monroe

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Confucius

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Aristotle

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

Alexander the Great

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

Galileo Galilei

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Hypatia

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Plato

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Alan Watts

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Albert Einstein

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Benjamin Franklin

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Hermann Hesse

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothing cannot exist forever.

Stephen Hawking

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

Napoleon Hill

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Franz Kafka

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Voltaire

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Aristotle