Philosophy Quotes

Character and intelligence are the poles you talent spins on, displaying your gifts.

There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine, that attacked (or 'limited') reason, which did not preach submission to the power of some authority.

Be good, and you will be lonesome, be lonesome and you will be free. Live a lie and you will live to regret it, that's what living is to me.

Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.

How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

Awe is what moves us forward.

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy, and make the most of where you are

Misconceptions play a prominent role in my view of the world.

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

The moment you make the internal changes necessary to obtain your goal, the outside world changes instantly.

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

Hope burns eternal in the human heart.

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.

All actual life is encounter.

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

We are healed to help others. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are saved to serve, not to sit around and wait for heaven.

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

Paradise is a state of mind.

The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.