Top 100 Philosopher Quotes
#1. The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.
Morris Raphael Cohen
#2. Philosopher and author Dr. Wayne Dyer calls the ego "edge god out." It is the process of disconnecting with the creative, true force of the universe. It is the process of making you separate from it, others, nature, and the universe.
Emily Maroutian
#3. I am not afraid to die because I know heaven is a place of artists, musicians and poets
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#4. Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body.
Jacques Loeb
#5. 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
#6. Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.
Frederick C. Beiser
#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. Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.
Jorge Luis Borges
#9. Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.
Gil Amelio
#10. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
#11. Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.
Epicurus
#12. I love deeply and admire the beauties of life and its expression in many different art forms. I am an aesthetic philosopher.
Debasish Mridha
#13. And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
#14. He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#15. In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.
Jonathan Swift
#16. Yes, it's rather funny, really, that next to no-one realized the snake that Harry set free in Philosopher's Stone turned out to be Voldemort's final Horcrux, Nagini
J.K. Rowling
#17. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Allan Bloom
#18. I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!
Galileo Galilei
#19. If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.
Apollonius Of Tyana
#20. So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. A philosopher is a deep thinker and a meticulous observer of nature and events that reveal the beauty, truth, and meaning of existence.
Debasish Mridha
#22. The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Bertrand Russell
#23. Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art.
Ben Jonson
#24. The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
Gordon Allport
#25. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry Kissinger
#26. Dandamis then looked at Alexander with pity. 'You have nothing I want,' he said. 'Once, you might have been a passable philosopher, but now you value no opinion save your own. You wander because you cannot bear to be still-you conquer because you cannot bear to rule.
Christian Cameron
#27. Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.
Ed Smith
#28. When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside'. He doesn't buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter
Chad Harbach
#29. This is what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The Christian, in spite of logic, has only one incarnation of the Logos; the philosopher has never finished with incarnations.
Karl Marx
#30. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Fernando Pessoa
#31. 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
#33. Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.
Denis Diderot
#34. The tenet of the philosopher that for each man there was only one perfect friend;
Mary Renault
#35. I would have looked away, should have, but I had never seen a green one. A weaker man might have plucked out his own eyes, but being a philosopher, I knew the sight could never be unseen, so I persevered.
Christopher Moore
#36. There is no philosopher in the world so great but he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#38. The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
Daniel Bell
#39. My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.
Walker Percy
#40. Destiny is manifested only through action.
Suzy Kassem
#41. We're in a post-conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today, our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.
Jeffrey Deitch
#42. It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
Alfred Korzybski
#43. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell".
Terry Pratchett
#45. 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
#46. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#47. 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
#48. In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?
Terry Pratchett
#49. If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
Lin Yutang
#50. I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo makes a similar point to Rorty: "We don't reach agreement when we have discovered the truth," he observes; "we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement.
Stephen Batchelor
#52. The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.
Lord Chesterfield
#53. A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where virute is concerned, Experience is the mother of illusion.
C.S. Lewis
#54. Philosophers are capable of almost endless enjoyment of mutual misunderstanding.
Lyman Bryson
#55. The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.
Alexandre Dumas
#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. This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.
Socrates
#58. if a philosopher wishes to be useful to human society, he must announce a God.
Voltaire
#60. Philosophy is so interesting and intriguing that it is almost boring not to be a philosopher.
Debasish Mridha
#61. It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
George Edward Woodberry
#63. Lewis Alison, a dark, craggy man of more than common height, gave no sign of sharing in the general curiosity. He stayed in his place, seeming to have wrapped himself in a composure not easily disturbed.
Charles Morgan
#64. Did you hear the story of Socrates? He was a philosopher in ancient Greece, so they killed him.
Troy DeNuthe
#65. Should we care about philosopher if the world so clearly doesn't?
N.D. Wilson
#66. You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you.
Amanda Hocking
#68. The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.
William Penn
#69. If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
Bertrand Russell
#70. Caleb had been my imperfection, with his slightly Americanized British accent, and the way he could play any sport and quote any philosopher. He was such a mix of class and jock, romance and jerk, it made me crazy.
Tarryn Fisher
#75. The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound health when you enter.
Epictetus
#76. He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen.
Will Durant
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but
eat as you ought. For remember that in this manner Socrates also universally avoided all ostentation.
Epictetus
#80. Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist and natural philosopher] walks in the midst of wonders.
John Herschel
#81. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#83. Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.
Stanislaw Lem
#84. But in the words of a great philosopher, you can't always get what you want.
Jonathan Kellerman
#85. 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
#86. A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'
A. P. Martinich
#87. The true philosopher lives his life as a dress rehearsal for death.
Peter Kreeft
#88. To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's.
Abraham Cowley
#89. I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I'm primarily a playboy philosopher.
Hugh Hefner
#90. Philosophy is the architectonic art and the philosopher the archetypal person
Richard H. Popkin
#91. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#92. According to the saying of an ancient philosopher, one should eat to live, and not live to eat
Moliere
#93. Death comes in endless forms. Of the body. Of the soul. Of the heart. - Catriona Mercant, philosopher and warrior. (circa 1419)
Nalini Singh
#94. As that great philosopher, Mary Poppins, once said, 'A spoonful of sugar makes the feminism go down.
Irene Ziegler
#95. 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
#96. The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.
Henry Adams
#97. The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone.
Paul Celan
#98. Passion is the soul of intensity. The speaker who truly loves God may or may not lead others to believe it, but the speaker who doesn't is only a philosopher whose ideas are too bland to be important.
Calvin Miller
#99. Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens ... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.
Freeman Dyson
#100. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
