Top 100 Best Philosophers Sayings
#1. To the Dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage
Plutarch
#2. As Plato, the dangerous beguiler, said: the best philosophers in the world are boys with their beards new on their chins; I am a boy again.
Thornton Wilder
#3. The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
Steven Levy
#5. I am not afraid to die because I know heaven is a place of artists, musicians and poets
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#6. Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.
Thomas More
#7. The 'absurdities' of life can either turn you into a 'philosopher' or a 'humorist'..
Both 'opposing' poles of the same scale, a matter of understanding..
Ideal, if we can slide down the scale this way and that...
Read somewhere..Philosophers get heard, Humorists get paid..
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#8. It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?
Isaac Asimov
#9. Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.
George Pattison
#10. Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science.
Richard Feynman
#11. Philosophers tell you what they think. Artists show you.
Marty Rubin
#12. This plan looks like foolishness to earthbound philosophers. How can man comprehend a plan so based on love and servitude that his own deliverance and restoration is achieved by the death of the very "Lord of glory" (2:8)?
Albert H. Baylis
#13. In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.
Henri Lebesgue
#14. Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
#15. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#16. I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.
Rene Descartes
#17. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#18. It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
#19. Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
Thomas Carlyle
#20. Wonder is a verb. An activity, like walking or eating cheese. Despite what we may think we are all already philosophers; the question simply is whether we do it well or poorly.
Thomas Swanson
#21. And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.
Norman Mailer
#22. Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life ...
Robert Henri
#23. We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Epictetus
#24. That which Steinitz gave to the theoretical aspect of the game when he was at his best is very remote to all out home-bred chess philosophers, but with his views on Morphy, whom he tries to discredit completely, it is of course impossible to agree.
Alexander Alekhine
#25. In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?
John Dewey
#26. But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.
George Pattison
#27. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#28. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.
Thomas Huxley
#29. Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?
Robert Nozick
#30. One can expect an agreement between philosophers sooner than between clocks.
Seneca.
#31. Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.
Max Lucado
#32. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers ... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?
Richard Feynman
#34. [Stephenson] believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies.
Peter Steinhart
#35. Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#36. Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.
David Papineau
#37. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
Aldous Huxley
#38. According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.
Charles Francis Richter
#39. I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.
Tim Crane
#41. The huge majority of philosophers seem to think that including impure properties in the range of the quantifiers of the principle would make the principle trivial. I have argued that it does not.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
#42. Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.
Patricia Churchland
#43. Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Cesare Pavese
#44. That's right!" agreed Majikthise. "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!" The
Douglas Adams
#45. You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
Catherine The Great
#46. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.
W.G. Sebald
#47. It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
Alfred Korzybski
#48. Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin.
Alexandre Dumas
#49. Hundreds of philosophies and scores of religions have been invented to circumvent the Word of God. Modern philosophers and psychologists are still trying to make it appear that there is some way out other than the path of Jesus.
Billy Graham
#50. Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.
Aldous Huxley
#51. A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.
Philip Pullman
#52. Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William Hazlitt
#53. The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
#54. Philosophers are capable of almost endless enjoyment of mutual misunderstanding.
Lyman Bryson
#55. Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#56. The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.
Nicole Kidman
#57. take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful.
Plutarch
#58. There are two ways of extending life : firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another ... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#59. To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.
Brigid Brophy
#60. A wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.
Charlotte Bronte
#62. Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
Richard Feynman
#63. It's easier to get philosophers to agree than clocks.
Seneca.
#64. There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.
George Savile
#65. All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far.
Hagiwara Sakutaro
#66. The venerable teachers, philosophers & spiritual practitioners throughout history have concluded that the greatest happiness we can experience comes from the development of an open, loving heart.
Allan Lokos
#67. Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.
Samuel Johnson
#68. The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
Herbert Read
#69. You will find that there is no other difference of opinion as regards any portions of the Universe, except that the philosophers believe in the Eternity of the Universe and we believe in the Creation. Note this.
Maimonides
#70. I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.
Emanuel Lasker
#71. The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#72. Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.
Swami Vivekananda
#73. Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it's fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#74. What I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
Cornel West
#75. The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers are what novels are for women.
Voltaire
#76. I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
#77. But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better.
Etienne Bonnot De Condillac
#78. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
Paul Lafargue
#79. Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil
Mark Twain
#80. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#81. I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a 'philosopher' simply do not have a day job to go to.
Kevin Warwick
#82. Osho is one of India's greatest mystics ... I see him as one of the world's great teachers, thinkers, philosophers and guides of our times. I have enormous respect for his world vision and the kind of International Communities he is building. I have always felt his influence in my life.
Kabir Bedi
#83. Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.
Pythagoras
#84. I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations - which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals . But ye do not understand me? -
Friedrich Nietzsche
#85. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
Stephen Hawking
#86. Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#87. Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
#88. We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils
Jostein Gaarder
#89. Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed?
Paul Valery
#90. Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?
Giordano Bruno
#91. Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists.
L.A. Paul
#92. The world's philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.
Robert Vaughn
#93. Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what's real and what isn't, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us.
Stephen King
#94. A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.
Tony Hoare
#95. I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
Walter Kirn
#96. Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
Leo Strauss
#97. What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
#98. Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
#99. For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.
Ken MacLeod
#100. Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
Bertrand Russell
