Philosophy quotes

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

A jug fills drop by drop.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

No man was ever wise by chance.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

God does not play dice.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

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

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Error is always more busy than truth.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

The universe is not indifferent to our existence – it depends on it.