Philosophy Quotes

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

And so do you suppose it must be a piece-work because it has been given to you (and could only be given to you) in pieces?

The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair.

I take happiness very seriously. It is a creed, a philosophy and an objective.

One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect at the same time.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb.

Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

Vivere est cogitare. (To think is to live)

We come now to the question: what is a priori certain or necessary, respectively in geometry (doctrine of space) or its foundations? Formerly we thought everything; nowadays we think nothing. Already the distance-concept is logically arbitrary; there need be no things that correspond to it, even approximately.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.

In constructing concepts, we overlook the fact that no two things are the same. There is no such thing as the concept of a leaf, only billions and billions of leaves.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves.

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

Don't borrow someone else's plan. Develop your own philosophy and it will lead you to unique places.

If you will be guided by me, you will make little account of Socrates, and much more of truth.

States will never be happy untilrulers become philosophers orphilosophers become rulers.

The key factor that will determine your financial future is not the economy; the key factor is your philosophy.

When I contemplated purpose I also contemplated chance and foolishness.

The wise man delights in water, the Good man delights in mountains. For the wise move; but the Good stay still. The wise are happy; but the good secure.

To live is to think.

In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.

Hast any philosophy in thee shepherd? .• • • • . . . He that wants money, means and content, is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and a great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

In Shankaracharya we saw tremendous intellectual power, throwing the scorching light of reason upon everything.

Death means nothing to men like me. It's the event that proves them right.

If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit--the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

I think everybody should study ants. They have an amazing four-part philosophy. Never give up, look ahead, stay positive and do all you can.

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

Master-morality and Slave-morality.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

"To be is to do," says the existentialist. "One only becomes real (human) at the point of action."

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Misunderstanding may arise by confusing the Buddhist and scientific definitions of death. Within the scientific system you spoke quite validly of the death of the brain and the death of heart. Different parts of the body can die separately. However, in the Buddhist system, the word death is not used in that way. You'd never speak of the death of a particular part of the body, but rather of the death of an entire person. When people say that a certain person died, we don't ask, "Well, which part died?"

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.