Motivational Quotes

Philosophers and philosophy

Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

- Proverb

Philosophers and philosophy Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Philosophers and philosophy

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

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Popper, Karl

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

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.

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

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory -- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

Melville, Herman

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

Donne, John

10.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Stevens, Wallace

11.

As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

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

Diogenes of Sinope

13.

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

Marx, Karl

14.

I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

Edwards, Oliver

15.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Plato

16.

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

Roux, Joseph

17.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Cicero, Marcus T.

18.

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

20.

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

Descartes, Rene

21.

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

22.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Maistre, Joseph De

23.

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

Pinter, Harold

24.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Socrates

27.

The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

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

30.

Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

Goldsmith, Oliver

32.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

33.

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

Zend, Robert

34.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Gauguin, Paul

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

41.

Plato was a bore.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

Smith, Sydney

43.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

44.

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

45.

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

Brookner, Anita

46.

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

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.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Whitehead, Alfred North

49.

The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.

Voltaire

50.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Hegel, Georg