Philosophical Quotes

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.

Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

Put a chair against the door, and turn the lights down low Write a letter to yourself, no one will ever know

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

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

Justice... is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.

Reason has, especially today, many other manifestations than philosophical ones.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

The study of the human brain and its disease remains one of the greatest scientific and philosophical challenges ever undertaken.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Happiness is the highest good

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize... They were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

Cannot people realize how large an income is thrift?

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

All pain is either severe or slight, if slight, it is easily endured; if severe, it will without doubt be brief.

The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

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

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!

The world is a philosophical prison and Man is the philosophical prisoner.

It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action. I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident

We should listen to both philosophers and scientists, because the philosophical contribution is different from the scientific contribution, and both of them are worthwhile.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.