Philosophy quotes

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life… Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

All men are equal before fish.

Plato was a bore.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.