Philosophy quotes

1363 quotes

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Henry David Thoreau

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Friedrich Nietzsche

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

George Bernard Shaw

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Winston Churchill

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Blaise Pascal

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Julius Caesar

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

Billy Graham

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Blaise Pascal

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Baruch Spinoza

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Bertrand Russell

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

Friedrich Nietzsche

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Isaac Newton

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Karl Marx

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Thomas Jefferson

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Christopher Hitchens

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

Eckhart Tolle

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

George Bernard Shaw

There is no wealth but life.

John Ruskin

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Baruch Spinoza

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Desmond Tutu

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Samuel Johnson

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Khalil Gibran

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

Julius Caesar

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Samuel Johnson

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Isaac Newton

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Blaise Pascal

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Nipsey Hussle

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Henry Adams

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Blaise Pascal

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Khalil Gibran

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The brain is wider than the sky.

Emily Dickinson

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Samuel Johnson

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Blaise Pascal

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Henry David Thoreau

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Karl Marx

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Samuel Johnson

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Nelson Mandela

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Ludwig van Beethoven

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

John Muir

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

George Bernard Shaw

Being is the great explainer.

Henry David Thoreau

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Benjamin Disraeli