Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

If you set your heart upon philosophy, you must straightway prepare yourself to be laughed at and mocked by many who will say Behold a philosopher arisen among us! or How came you by that brow of scorn? But do you cherish no scorn, but hold to those things which seem to you the best, as one set by God in that place. Remember too, that if you abide in those ways, those who first mocked you, the same shall afterwards reverence you; but if you yield to them, you will be laughed at twice as much as before.

- Epictetus

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Epictetus

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Philosophy is doubt.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.

Voltaire

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning.

Bergerac, Savinien Cyrano De

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Diderot, Denis

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Murdoch, Iris

10.

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.

Descartes, Rene

11.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Berkeley, George

13.

If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Twain, Mark

14.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns.

Milton, John

17.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

Canetti, Elias

20.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.

Keats, John

21.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Marx, Karl

22.

The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.

Sade, Marquis De

23.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

One may summon his philosophy when they are beaten in battle, not till then.

Burroughs, John

25.

Philosophers call God the great unknown The great misknown is more like it!

Roux, Joseph

26.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists -- in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

27.

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.

Brooks, Mel

28.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Pinter, Harold

29.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.

Reade, W. Winwood

30.

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.

Colton, Charles Caleb

31.

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity.

Sagan, Carl Edward

33.

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

Proverb

34.

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Brookner, Anita

35.

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.

Zend, Robert

36.

Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

Teasdale, Sara

37.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?

Diogenes of Sinope

38.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Camus, Albert

39.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

Leary, Timothy

40.

Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair.

Tait, Katherine

41.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

Jefferson, Thomas

43.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

Feuerbach, Ludwig

45.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

James, William

46.

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say thus it shall be!, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past -- they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their knowing is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is -- will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

49.

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

Seneca

50.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig