Top 54 Ancient Philosophy Quotes
#1. The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.
Amar Bose
#2. ...engaging with a work of ancient philosophy can be a two-way street; bringing it into a discussion can enrich that discussion, which also encouraging us to see the work in light of that discussion.
Julia Annas
#3. Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.
Pierre Hadot
#4. PYRRHONISM- An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. I hope to bring ancient philosophy and new scientific thinking together, to provide a new perspective of nature, especially the relationship between nature and man.
Liu Dan
#6. Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#8. The world will not change by our position in the Universe. Actions change when beliefs change; collective actions and beliefs change the world.
Matthew A. Petti
#9. HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.
Tom Stoppard
#10. The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.
Dean Radin
#11. In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion, but, rather, our culture's newfound faith - science - that challenges the belief in free will.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#12. Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical system where all the subjects can be taught.
Michel Onfray
#13. At times, look back towards your ancient days, drink deep from the eternal fountain of wisdom long gone, and then look ahead.
Abhijit Naskar
#14. I'm warning you, I am a lethal killing machine. It was a secret government experiment. They did stuff to me. Spooky stuff... Anal stuff. It turned me into a dangerous telekinetic. As the ancient Tibetan Philosophy states "Don't start none, won't be none!
Andy Diggle
#15. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#16. He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.
Kenneth W. Harl
#17. The teachings of Osho, in fact, encompass many religions, but he is not defined by any of them. He is an illuminating speaker on Zen, Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy ... and also a prolific author.
Nevill Drury
#18. Only the sixth sense can expose what the other five have hidden.
Matthew A. Petti
#19. This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief
like a whisper of wind
when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.
Edward Abbey
#20. All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.
Emanuel Swedenborg
#21. As the profoundest philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece lighted her taper at Israel's altar, so the sweetest strains of the pagan muse were swept from harps attuned on Zion's hill.
Edward Thomson
#22. Fas est ab hoste doceri.
One should learn even from one's enemies.
Ovid
#23. TRUTH, n.: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.
Ambrose Bierce
#24. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.
Thomas Paine
#25. I'd like to be an academic, a philosophy lecturer if possible. I'd do a Masters in Ancient Hebrew maybe, and a Ph.D. hopefully, if I get in.
Jack Gleeson
#26. The stability of modern governments above the ancient, and the accuracy of modern philosophy, have improved, and probably will still improve, by similar gradations.
David Hume
#27. Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.
Donald Phillip Verene
#28. What conclusion is to be drawn from this paradox so worthy of being born in our time; and what will become of virtue when one has to get rich at all cost?
The ancient political thinkers forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#29. Mysteries are the evidence to errors in our religious and historical precepts.
Matthew A. Petti
#30. He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
Confucius
#31. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#32. One can expect an agreement between philosophers sooner than between clocks.
Seneca.
#33. I think ... that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals ...
Corliss Lamont
#34. Esoteric philosophy teaches that the physical form, the
body, of the individual is made new at birth; but the soul
is ancient, the stuff of stars.
Normandi Ellis
#35. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.
Russell Shorto
#36. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.
Amish Tripathi
#38. Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.
Julian Baggini
#39. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
Michel De Montaigne
#40. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
Tim Blake Nelson
#41. According to the saying of an ancient philosopher, one should eat to live, and not live to eat
Moliere
#42. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#43. Foretold by ancient seers and now by scientists, we are at the unprecedented historic and evolutionary crossroad. We have the capacity to transform ourselves spiritually and our civilisation materially or de-evolve into an Orwellian nightmare
Jonathan R. Banks
#44. Over most of the one thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophy was assiduously studied in every generation by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives.
John M. Cooper
#45. Every scripture, no matter how ancient, must go through rigorous human scrutiny.
Abhijit Naskar
#46. The tantras are ancient sacred books of India and Tibet. The tantras detail specific means for attaining liberation.
Frederick Lenz
#48. In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Steve Maraboli
#49. It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
Aristotle.
#50. And he recalled the ancient adage: Who must do the harsh things? He who can.
Trevanian
#51. Every trace of the old philosophy and literatureof the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.
Saint John Chrysostom
#52. Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose Bierce
#53. Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.
Tess Gerritsen
