Philosophy quotes

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

The lie is a condition of life.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Man is a universe within himself.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

What we live by we die by.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

What goes up must come down.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Forever is composed of nows.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.