Top 100 Philosophically Quotes
#1. No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?
Terry Pratchett
#2. Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
#3. Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing.
Per Petterson
#4. It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!
Ron Carlson
#5. Georgian film is a completely unique phenomenon, vivid, philosophically inspiring, very wise, childlike. There is everything that can make me cry and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing.
Federico Fellini
#6. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
#7. Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.
Karl Jaspers
#8. Well, everybody does something, some people race cars, others collect stamps, I find tai chi to be philosophically, aesthetically, physically and spiritually fascinating.
Lou Reed
#9. Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.
Robert J. Sawyer
#10. The continually moving mind is philosophically symbolized by the avatar Fudo Myo-o, the Wisdom King, often depicted holding a sword in one hand for cutting through ignorance, and a rope in the other for tying up passions.
Yagyu Munenori
#11. Don't nobody ever want it to rain," the nearest of the sellers of beasts remarked philosophically, "but everybody wants to go on eatin'.
Gene Wolfe
#12. I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
Ian Rankin
#13. Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.
Gordon W. Allport
#14. We all paint on a face to show the world," Nicholas replies philosophically. "For some of us, that's quite literal.
L. H. Cosway
#15. One philosophically fascinating aspect of Catholicism is the very strange conception of reality it presents (the incarnation, the eucharist, judgement day etc.).
Tim Crane
#16. I speculate that this is the best of all possible worlds, for philosophy is the best of humanity, and this world is the best philosophically.
Kedar Joshi
#17. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.
Jim Jarmusch
#18. I remembered his expression remained not exactly bored so much as philosophically separate
Joe Dunthorne
#19. Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.
Philip Kitcher
#20. A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#22. I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, but I prefer not to take tea with him.
Albert Einstein
#23. Grandiosity is when we are wrapped up in winning life's false contest. This happens only when we live to impress the abusive parents in our heads, not when we are soberly and philosophically working to advance civilization.
Steven Franssen
#24. People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.
Richard P. Feynman
#25. Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.
William A. Dembski
#26. Being at the top of your game intellectually, philosophically, politically, is not a forever thing.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#27. It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).
Julian Barnes
#28. For me as a man, philosophically, when you talk about honor and integrity, that's the way I want to live my life. It moved me.
Tom Cruise
#29. I've never had a five-year plan or a three-year plan, or whatever, ... We had an idea philosophically of what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.
Kirk Ferentz
#30. The more philosophically coherent something is, the more lunatic it is going to be.
Charles Cosimano
#31. It is impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and be a Republican. It's philosophically absolutely opposed - if they could only think about what they were saying for a minute. That's when you get caught up in the webs of what people call themselves and how they behave.
Neil Peart
#32. To take philosophy seriously is to engage with it philosophically.
Jay L. Garfield
#33. I'm proud of my relationship with 'Star Trek'! 'Star Trek' is a show that I am philosophically compatible with.
George Takei
#34. In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off.
Wilkie Collins
#35. I think branching out is cool, but I think that you have to branch out in a way that makes some sort of organic sense. I would love to put out a rock record eventually, but it would have to somehow philosophically make sense for me.
El-P
#36. People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.
Karen Armstrong
#37. Sophie found philosophy doubly exciting because she was able to follow all the ideas by using her own common sense - without having to remember everything she had learned at school. She decided that philosophy was not something you can learn; but perhaps you can learn to think philosophically.
Jostein Gaarder
#38. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#39. Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind.
Blake Bailey
#40. I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew.
Albert Einstein
#41. The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
Galileo Galilei
#42. If one could be right every hand, none of us would be here,' he said philosophically.
Ian Fleming
#43. Reichenbach, I believe, made it a precondition for doing scientific epistemology that the very notion of 'Jewish science' be philosophically inadmissible. The Nazi racial laws were not only a crime against humanity, they were a crime against philosophical principle.
Ronald N. Giere
#44. I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.
Terry Pratchett
#45. I tell you, I've seen things," Panther growled philosophically, "squirrels chasing their tails like dogs, dogs climbing trees like squirrels, but I've never seen a house behave like a flower, demanding to be watered.
Ksenia Anske
#46. Philosophically speaking, shadows of people are friendlier than people themselves because they come together very easily!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. Philosophically, war is an extension of man's struggle with sin and evil in the world.
Billy Graham
#48. Alec looked at her and shook his head. "How do you manage never to get mud on your clothes?"
Isabelle shrugged philosophically. "I'm pure at heart. It repels the dirt.
Cassandra Clare
#49. If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.
Willem De Kooning
#50. Whether philosophically you believe in a public subsidization of an arena or a stadium, that's the reality. We can't have professional basketball in this community by the end of our lease in 2010 without subsidization.
Wally Walker
#51. Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?
Salvador Dali
#52. It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.
Max Born
#53. First of all, "no self" doesn't mean there is no self, haha. So the "no problem" is jumped at a little too fast I'm afraid. Especially in American culture where people tend to be materialistic philosophically. I don't mean running to the mall, but philosophically, you see?
Robert Thurman
#54. I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.
Denis Dutton
#55. But all our attempts have proved to be singularly ineffectual, and will continue to do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they, our opponents, who are all wrong, morally and philosophically.
C. G. Jung
#56. Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.
Julian Barnes
#57. Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend
is statism.
Philosophically, the goal is the
obliteration of reason;
psychologically, it is the
erosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
#58. Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians, and normal consultants found that very hard to deal with.
Newt Gingrich
#59. I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'
Pete Townshend
#60. Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image of God.
(from The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers)
Eleanore Stump
#62. For the life of me, I don't understand what honest motive there is in putting this in front of this body to philosophically debate marriage on a constitutional amendment that is not going to happen, and which is enormously divisive in all of our communities.
Dianne Feinstein
#63. Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically - i.e. in the form of society aimed at - the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.
George Orwell
#64. Hollywood - that's a place where love is viewed both pragmatically and philosophically in the saying, 'Tis better to have loved and divorced than never to have had any publicity at all.
Ava Gardner
#65. Any fool can be happy. What I'm interested in is satisfaction. There's got to be more to life than just being happy. You've got to be fulfilled. You've got to be satisfied; philosophically satisfied is what I mean.
Charlie Trotter
#66. I - obviously, I'm not a big fan of President Obama. I think he's been one of our weakest presidents. I just fundamentally disagree with him philosophically.
Dick Cheney
#67. I don't reckon men are supposed to think," Sally said philosophically, as the pile of hemp rope grew at her feet. "That's why God gave 'em big muscles.
Mary Connealy
#68. The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#69. Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels - practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.
Geoffrey Wood
#70. Faggots make the best friends," she said philosophically. "They're very loyal.
Piper Kerman
#71. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.
Murray Rothbard
#72. Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole.
Arthur Eddington
#73. Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself.
Frederick Lenz
#74. In my religion it's actually better to know you're doing wrong and try to improve that wrong than to think philosophically that what you're doing is right and in fact it is wrong.
Jack Abramoff
#75. R. V. L. Hartley, the inventor of the Hartley oscillator, was thinking philosophically about the transmission of information at about this time, and he summarized his reflections in a paper, "Transmission of Information," which he published in 1928.
John Robinson Pierce
#76. Benno blushed violently. "I am not a murderer!" he protested. "No one is, until he commits his first crime," William said philosophically.
Umberto Eco
#77. Philosophically, Dubois may have had no problem with a great African American institution. On the other hand, he always believed ultimately in the co-mingling of groups and the interplay of talents and in the collaboration of groups.
David Levering Lewis
#78. Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man's existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.
Ayn Rand
#79. Philosophically speaking, from the Buddhist point of view, both human beings and animals possess what in Tibetan is called shepa, which can be roughly translated as "consciousness," albeit to different degrees of complexity.
Dalai Lama XIV
#80. My husband has always agreed with me philosophically.
Cindy Sheehan
#81. I'd rather speak as a student of philosophy. Philosophically it makes no sense, absolutely makes no sense. Why should people inherit evil things when their memories could contain and should invoke good things?
Elie Wiesel
#82. As I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.
Helen Simonson
#83. Philosophically, what I have learned is to thy own self be true. That is the biggest lesson of all. Relax; music is fun. To many people take it to seriously because of the money involved.
Greg Lake
#84. [On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.
Katharine Whitehorn
#85. The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21).
Annie Dillard
#86. Exercise, not philosophically and with religious gravity undertaken, but with the wild and romping activities of a spirited girl who runs up and down as if her veins were full of wine.
Lola Montez
#87. I knew Donald Fagan at Bard. He was wildly gifted. He gave me a phone number which I never used and I guess I lost! Philosophically it's an interesting song; I mean I think his 'number' is a cipher for the self.
Rikki Ducornet
#88. It was all part of the Eastern system of control and appropriation, Frankie reflected philosophically. The old controlled the young, the educated the uneducated, and as for the rich, well the rich had no doubt at all that they actually owned the poor.
Ashok Ferrey
#89. Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great. But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic - if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?
Thomas Bangalter
#90. Even virtue itself, all perfect as it is, requires to be inspirited by passion; for duties are but coldly performed which are but philosophically fulfilled.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#91. No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can't recognize that the world has changed or should change.
Frank Rich
#92. Hear that, Eustace? He wishes we were staying a good long time."
"I expect it will seem a good long time," said Eustace, philosophically.
P.G. Wodehouse
#93. Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of man better than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#94. I see myself as a person who wants to serve the constituents within my district and find a way to move those who are not in our position philosophically to our position.
Tim Scott
#95. The more propaganda ... conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically , the more nails they'll drive into capitalism's coffin.
Ayn Rand
#96. There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.
Lorraine Hansberry
#97. Philosophically, I don't like doing commercials.
Herb Caen
#98. A non-doer is very often a critic-that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.
Wayne W. Dyer
#99. My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs).
J.R.R. Tolkien
