#Philosophy Quotes

“Divers philosophers hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth.”

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.”

“We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from... Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.”

“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.”

“Time ... thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.”

“The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' ... There is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball.”

“Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.”

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

“Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.”

“A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.”

“Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.”

“In Nature, all is useful, all is beautiful”

“No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.”

“We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.”

“The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.”

“What a piece of work is a man”

“Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy.”

“Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.”

“And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?”

“How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!”

“The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.”

“At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used neat.”

“The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.”

“Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.”

“A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.”

“The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.”

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

“Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.”

“And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.”

“A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.”

“There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.”

“The primary wisdom is intuition. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their origin.”

“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.”

“Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.”

“There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

“The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.”

“The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity.”

“Is not the truth the truth?”

“We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.”

“The true philosopher and the true poet are one,and a beauty, which is truth,and a truth, which is beauty,is the aim of both.”

“We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.”

“Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.”

“Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.”

“People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.”

“Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”

“How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!”

“Life is a test and this world a place of trial.”

“The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.”