Top 100 First Philosophy Quotes
#1. At one point I took a copy of Berkeley's Principles from my father's library. That was the first philosophy book I read. I found it fascinating and wanted to read more philosophy.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
#2. You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that's good.
Michael Grant
#3. The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.
Alan E. Johnson
#4. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets - most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?
Kathryn Schulz
#6. To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation.
Irvin D. Yalom
#7. First time success is not the assurance for second time success.
Amit Kalantri
#8. The first duty of a man is to love himself. When someone loves himself, he is loving the universe. This universe is existing because of you.
Debasish Mridha
#9. To profoundly understand a baby, you must first be a mother.
Debasish Mridha
#10. Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#11. I'm a believer in the parent first, friend second philosophy, and trying to find that balance.
Jenna Fischer
#12. Any advanced student will tell you the best way to recover guard is simply not to get your guard passed in the first place.
Chris Matakas
#13. Second chances are not that important. What's important, is being ready when the first chance
is given.
Jay Long
#14. If you're expecting an upside in everything you do you might get extremely disappointed unless you also think about the consequences of a downside first.
Lou Silluzio
#15. . . . the abandonment of metaphysics involves more than the redefinition of the nature of rational inquiry in accordance with the tenets of modern scientific methodology; this redefinition itself makes matters of value and validity mere matters of opinion.
Alan White
#17. The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.
Maimonides
#18. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Ray Bradbury
#19. There's a reason diehard fans get to the ballpark hours before game time. It's not for better parking. It's not for extra time to find our seats. It's not so we'll have time to down an extra hot dog, heavy on the mustard, prior to the first pitch. It's called BP.
Tucker Elliot
#20. Even a man who had survived a hundred battle can break in his hundred-and-first.
George R R Martin
#21. It's not that blue-collar philosophy is misunderstood, it's that blue-collar philosophy shouldn't exist in the first place. The ultimate question is not the justification of ones existence when your belly screams for sustenance? People are hungry god damn it!
Mick Lexington
#22. First know the Self and then talk of social reformation.
Abhijit Naskar
#23. For all the girls in all the worlds.
May you feel strength with your first breath,
realize your unlimited potential for greatness on your second, and follow your dreams on your third.
C.S. O'Kelly
#24. It is better to know oneself than know to others. So not find fault others see first in yourself. When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.
Suman Jyoty Bhante
#25. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Ashley Montagu
#26. I'm lazy, I like to do it right the first time.
Cian Beirdd
#27. I first heard of Parmenides' best-known assertion, "Whatever is, is." I laughed and blurted out, "And he's famous?" With this verbal ejaculation I revealed myself as the quintessential sophomore.
R.C. Sproul
#29. The way to get started is to take the first step with dream-powered optimism.
Debasish Mridha
#30. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#31. I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.
Karan Bajaj
#32. To become strong, analyse yourself first. You must detect your weaknesses to overcome them.
Eraldo Banovac
#33. The catchall phrase big data means three things. First, it is a bundle of technologies. Second, it is a potential revolution in measurement. And third, it is a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be-and perhaps should be-made in the future
Steve Lohr
#34. Think that today is the best day of your life and, with love and kindness, change yourself to begin the first day of the rest of your existing life.
Debasish Mridha
#35. The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.
Seneca.
#36. I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.
Immanuel Kant
#37. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.
Brock Clarke
#38. To serve the world, serve yourself first by becoming happy and the best person that you can be.
Debasish Mridha
#39. An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#41. I have loved humanity, I have loved it so much. For me, there are three kinds of men; he who curses life, he who blesses it and he who contemplates it. I loved the first for his wretchedness, the second for his indulgence and the third for his perception.
Kahlil Gibran
#42. Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.
Phaedrus
#43. The Flinstones wore furs, they ate red meat, and had a stoneage philosophy. In fact, they were the first Republicans ...
Jay Leno
#44. Let us try to heal the mind first before we heal the body.
Debasish Mridha
#45. If you teach how best to bite; watch out, you might as well be the first victim.
Anita Ibeakanma
#46. A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#47. First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.
Paul Klee
#48. I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
#51. Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.
Adam Smith
#52. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.
Nenia Campbell
#53. For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
Paul Engle
#55. Clean your home first before complaining about others.
Debasish Mridha
#56. Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.
Sophie Kinsella
#58. Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen.
Plutarch
#59. I've not got a first in philosophy without being able to muddy things pretty satisfactory.
John Banham
#60. Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
#62. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Ayn Rand
#63. Emotions stem from attitudes, therefore you should change your attitude in the first place. Feelings and emotions are nothing but consequences. They are caused by one single thing, importance.
Vadim Zeland
#64. Put First Things First! These four words cover an entire philosophy which can be applied with profit by every business leader, by every executive and by every employee.
Thomas Watson Jr.
#65. I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!
Slavoj Zizek
#66. Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.
Pope John Paul II
#67. First of all you must understand that practising martial arts means studying a certain oriental philosophy of life, otherwise it's merely a vacuous sport devoid of any significance.
William C. Brown
#68. Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
H.L. Mencken
#69. I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#70. When you cut the cords on the safety net and walk out on the highwire, you become yourself and become all that you can be and all that you were meant to be. But first, you must cut the cords.
Chloe Thurlow
#71. Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.
Immanuel Kant
#72. To be a success, first dream, then visualize and then act.
Debasish Mridha
#73. The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.
Peter Sloterdijk
#74. I remember, in my first show in New York, they asked, 'Where is the Indian-ness in your work?' ... Now, the same people, after having watched the body of my work, say, 'There is too much Indian philosophy in your work.' They're looking for a superficial skin-level Indian-ness, which I'm not about.
A. Balasubramaniam
#75. Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.
John Dewey
#76. When you see a person for the first time, you're not seeing him, but seeing yourself and your whole life in his mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#77. Government does not create wealth; it redistributes it. Whatever it gives you it must first take from someone else.
Robert W. McGee
#78. Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch's ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels-but alas! We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams, By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth.
Alan Judd
#79. Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.
Mary Karr
#80. Being Human clothing was first launched in France, Belgium and Spain, where the brand's philosophy of look good, do good is connecting with people and not just Salman Khan.
Salman Khan
#81. I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.
Peter Kreeft
#82. He who wishes to gain understanding, must first depart from devilish ways.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#83. ...True classical dropouts in society are those who avoid difficult challenges and cling to the first opportunity that comes their way. They never test their talents. These latent talents will only help to produce the next cycle of dropouts...
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#84. Teenagers and younger children did not need to sit in business class, let alone first - that was Franny's philosophy. The extra room was for people who could appreciate it, truly appreciate it, and she did.
Emma Straub
#85. In order to succeed, we must first dream. Then we must believe in that dream and take action.
Debasish Mridha
#86. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.
Robert M. Pirsig
#87. Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.
Albert Camus
#88. Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Bertrand Russell
#89. The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S. Burroughs
#90. Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes - I mean the universe - but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written
Galileo Galilei
#92. Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.
Muriel Spark
#93. The first duty of a man is to think for himself
Jose Marti
#94. Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.
Denis Diderot
#95. It is not a profession to be a pianist and musician. It is a philosophy, a conception of life that cannot be based on good intentions or natural talent. First and foremost there must be a spirit of sacrifice.
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
#96. state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.
Robert D. Kaplan
#97. Don't accept any knowledge or conventional wisdom without critically questioning it first.
Debasish Mridha
#98. We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place.
Chris Matakas
#99. It's the easiest thing in the world to be kind to someone, to show love, to forgive. You are born with this instinct - it should be your first reaction. NOT violence, anger and hatred! That is something we are taught, it's a Choice You Make.
Michelle Horst
#100. First impressions are rarely worth preserving. Men typically fall short of our expectations.
Renate Linnenkoper
