Philosophy quotes

1363 quotes

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

Henry Adams

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

Bertrand Russell

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.

Khalil Gibran

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Such as we are made of, such we be.

William Shakespeare

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal

The lie is a condition of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Joyce Meyer

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.

Samuel Johnson

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Samuel Johnson

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

E. E. Cummings

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

Blaise Pascal

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Karl Marx

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Terry Pratchett

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.

Isaac Newton

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.

Richard P. Feynman

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

Khalil Gibran

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

Bob Dylan

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

Napoleon Bonaparte

Man is a universe within himself.

Bob Marley

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Virginia Woolf

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

Bertrand Russell

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Blaise Pascal

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Epicurus

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

Emily Dickinson

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?

Richard P. Feynman

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky

What we live by we die by.

Robert Frost

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

Karl Marx

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Joseph Addison

What goes up must come down.

Isaac Newton

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Dwayne Johnson

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

John D. Rockefeller

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Khalil Gibran

Forever is composed of nows.

Emily Dickinson

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Baruch Spinoza

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

Isaac Newton

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

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.

Bono

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Bob Dylan