Top 100 Quotes About The Philosophers
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#11. 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
#12. but that it is only the writings and precepts of the philosophers and other fine writers that are the true riches, because they enrich with virtue the minds of those that possess them." Euthydemus
Xenophon
#13. All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.
Philip Yancey
#14. Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
James Weldon Johnson
#15. The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.
Elie Wiesel
#16. Opinion rules the world, but in the long run it is the philosophers who shape opinion
Voltaire
#17. Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death.
Jostein Gaarder
#18. The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.
Umberto Eco
#19. The quest for our origin is the sweet fruit's juice which maintains satisfaction in the minds of the philosophers.
Luca Pacioli
#20. Historically the most striking result of Kant's labors was the rapid separation of the thinkers of his own nation and, though less completely, of the world, into two parties;-the philosophers and the scientists.
Lawrence Joseph Henderson
#21. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
Theodor Adorno
#22. Wherefore all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only vain and confused, but is also mad, deceitful, and spurious; for, though the philosophers sometimes utter excellent sayings, yet they have nothing but what is short-lived, and even mixed up with wicked and erroneous sentiments.
John Calvin
#23. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.
Blaise Pascal
#24. The philosophers stone is just an allegory. It represents everything that man wants and can never have.
Katherine Howe
#25. The fondness or indifference that the philosophers expressed for life was merely a preference inspired by their self-love, and will no more bear reasoning upon than the relish of the palate or the choice of colors.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#26. Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools _always_ speak the truth. The deduction is plain
adults and wise persons _never_ speak it.
Mark Twain
#27. No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
Moliere
#28. Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.
Philip Yancey
#29. What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
#31. I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.
Louise Bourgeois
#32. Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.
Frederic William Farrar
#33. Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry.
Robert Boyle
#34. The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.
Stokely Carmichael
#35. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]
Karl Marx
#36. I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
#37. The code of Manu differs from the bible. By means of it the nobles, the philosophers, and the warriors keep the whip hand over the majority. It is full of noble valuations; it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. Einstein, my upset stomach hates your theory [of General Relativity] - it almost hates you yourself! How am I to' provide for my students? What am I to answer to the philosophers?!!
Paul Ehrenfest
#40. Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.
Epictetus
#41. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
#42. 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
#43. For they, the philosophers, were considered teachers of right living, which is far more excellent, since to speak well belongs only to a few, but to live well belongs to all.
Lactantius
#44. In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.
Wallace Stevens
#45. We should put our trust not in the crowd, who say that only free men can be educated, but rather in the philosophers, who say that none but the educated can be free.
Epictetus
#46. It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.
Albert Pike
#47. While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Robert Darnton
#48. Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
Steven Johnson
#49. It was not the philosophers and the prophets who taught us to believe in life after death; all they did was give form and spiritual content to an instinctive perception as old as man himself.
Muhammad Asad
#50. I think the more you hone your voice, take risks and talk about things that matter, the better chance you have of getting into the realm of the philosophers of stand up. But you have to be funny.
Ted Alexandro
#51. For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers.
Neel Burton
#52. It's an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it's the soul
But it's not the soul: it's the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing.
Alberto Caeiro
#53. The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.
Johann Georg Hamann
#54. The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.
Maimonides
#56. All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
Walter Mosley
#57. After all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.
Lawrence Durrell
#58. It isn't at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin. What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.
Soren Kierkegaard
#59. In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl Of Halifax
#60. Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).
Alasdair MacIntyre
#61. Hope was other people, no matter what the philosophers said. And this was a time that needed hope.
Tiffany Reisz
#62. St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#63. The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.
Julius Evola
#64. It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#65. The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
#66. Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
Judith Butler
#67. The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?
George Berkeley
#68. For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.
Stephen Cole Kleene
#69. For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.
Epictetus
#70. And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.
Plato
#71. The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.
Andre Maurois
#72. A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
Bertrand Russell
#73. One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
James Russell Lowell
#74. What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
#75. I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#76. Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.
Thomas Metzinger
#78. The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them
Stephen Hawking
#79. I died seventy-six hours ago - or so I've been told. Nonexistence - how to describe it? There are no words. I leave that question and the entire Great Guess to the philosophers, the theologians, and the ministers. This is all I know: I was; I was not; I was again.
Stephen Payne
#80. This is the thing I fight. This is the monster I must defeat. I fear that I have taken too long. Already, so much destruction has occurred that I fear for mankind's survival. Is this truly the end of the world, as many of the philosophers predict?
Brandon Sanderson
#81. When the philosophers despised riches, it was because they had a mind to vindicate their own merit, and take revenge upon the injustice of fortune by vilifying those enjoyments which she had not given them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#82. The psalmist saith more to the point about true happiness in this short Psalm than any one of the philosophers, or all of them put together; they did but beat the bush, God hath here put the bird into our hand. John Trapp, 1660
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#83. When I saw that Moses' version of the Genesis of the world did not fit sufficiently in many ways with Aristotle and the rest of the philosophers, I began to have doubts about the truth of all philosophers and started to investigate the secrets of nature.
Gerardus Mercator
#84. It's stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.
Alberto Caeiro
#85. The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#86. The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal.
Martin Luther
#87. The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.
Gary Inbinder
#88. The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.
Elias Canetti
#90. Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
Desiderius Erasmus
#91. If thou knewest the whole Bible, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what should all this profit thee without the love and grace of God?
Thomas A Kempis
#92. Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.
Lactantius
#93. Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#94. We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
Steven Levy
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
