Philosophy quotes

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

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

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

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

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

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

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.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

There is no wealth but life.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

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

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

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.

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

The brain is wider than the sky.

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

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

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

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

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

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.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

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.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

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

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

Being is the great explainer.

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

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

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