Top 100 The Philosopher Quotes
#1. That's life" said the philosopher each time he was almost laid prostrate, "It's often our best friends who make us fall
Victor Hugo
#3. It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.
Ray Bradbury
#4. According to the philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville: The wise man has nothing left to expect or to hope for. Because he is entirely happy, he needs nothing. Because he needs nothing, he is entirely happy.
Matthieu Ricard
#5. As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.
Ryan Holiday
#6. Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Plato
#7. The philosopher says
I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:
No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
Henry Adams
#8. What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. And though the philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.
David Hume
#10. When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.
Charles Baxter
#11. This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"
The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world.
Steven Pressfield
#12. Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.
Marvin Minsky
#13. It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source.
Frederick Soddy
#14. Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#15. A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
Johann Georg Hamann
#16. Bvalltu, for such approximately was the philosopher's name, the "11" being pronounced more or less as in 27 Welsh, Bvalltu effected a "cure" by merely inviting
Olaf Stapledon
#17. Whenever God looks devilish, I see the philosopher fail.
Kedar Joshi
#18. But life here is not the end. Reality is more than we think it to be. There is another and greater reality that envelops this earthly one. Earth is not outside heaven, as the philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote; it is heaven's workshop, heaven's womb.
Gerald L. Sittser
#19. The true business of the philosopher, though not flattering to his vanity, is merely to ascertain, arrange and condense the facts.
John Leslie
#20. What does it take to live a good life? The philosopher had written something about this quite early on in the course. Everybody needs food, warmth, love, and care. Such basics
Jostein Gaarder
#21. What is the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher?
A mathematician uses a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.
The philosopher needs only the pencil and paper.
Matthew Rave
#22. Is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?
G.K. Chesterton
#23. When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
Edward Abbey
#24. The cynic who twitted Aristippus by observing that the philosopher who could dine on herbs might despise the company of a king, was well replied to by Aristippus, when he remarked that the philosopher who could enjoy the company or a king might also despise a dinner of herbs.
Charles Caleb Colton
#25. The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbour by his own nature.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#26. 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
#27. Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to keep this in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.
Marcus Aurelius
#28. You scoundrel, you have wronged me," hissed the philosopher, "May you live forever!
Ambrose Bierce
#29. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#30. Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#31. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
Edward Gibbon
#32. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery, on the other hand, is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#33. The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.
Jacques Derrida
#34. All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#36. The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
Plato
#37. How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing ... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.
Plato
#39. The philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely transpose it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. The philosopher's soul dwells in his head, the poet's soul is in his heart; the singer's soul lingers about his throat, but the soul of the dancer abides in all her body.
Kahlil Gibran
#41. To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.
Arthur Holly Compton
#42. For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness - parent of all horrors.
Thomas Ligotti
#43. The philosopher had rescued her. The unknown letter writer had saved her from the triviality of everyday existence.
Jostein Gaarder
#44. Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Will Durant
#45. When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.
Thomas Hardy
#46. which is to say, stand with the philosopher, or else with the mob!" - EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.15.13 W
Ryan Holiday
#47. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124
Naomi Oreskes
#48. The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
Wallace Stevens
#49. For conclusion, I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught.
Philip Sidney
#50. The simple style is bad for the savage because he does worse than to obtain the luxuries of life; it is good for the philosopher because he does better than to work for them. The question is whether you can bear freedom ...
Henry David Thoreau
#51. Only a tiny percentage of people in the world care about moral theory in the sense I have been discussing, whereas 100 percent of the people in the world like stories. Most moral insights come from stories, but it is the special virtue of the philosopher to organize those insights
Anonymous
#52. The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.
Donald M. MacKinnon
#53. This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#54. The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. "It was a fucking miracle that I found him," she tells the philosopher.
Jenny Offill
#55. The maximalist dreamers of this epoch, the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) group led by the philosopher of proletarian culture, Aleksandr Bogdanov, were effectively defeated by the hardheaded "centrist" Leninists by 1912.
Michael David-Fox
#56. The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world of symphony and to re-project them in the form if concepts
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.
Simon Critchley
#58. We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever ... and all the time it is carrying us about ... It is the human nervous system itself.
Robert Anton Wilson
#59. Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#60. Socrates
The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion.
To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen to the dictates of reason
Alain De Botton
#61. The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.
Morris Raphael Cohen
#62. In my early youth - he would later write to his friend, the philosopher Constantin Noica - seduced me solely the libraries and the brothels.
Emil Cioran
#63. For modern man, survival meant mental change. The stubborn died as martyrs; the fanatic and the philosopher perished in the face of sudden change. To survive now one had to be pliable; one had to adjust to new codes and ideals and morals. The mind had to change.
William Mulvihill
#64. Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.
Max Ernst
#65. Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#66. And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.
Miguel De Unamuno
#67. The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.
R.S. Thomas
#68. There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.
Ambrose Bierce
#69. I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look from above, and realize that we are not special, none of us are, I think it would just cause a transformation.
Paul Bloom
#70. The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
Thomas Carlyle
#71. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
#72. I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.
Timothy Leary
#73. If you wanted to explore the castle forever and ever, you'd need to get hold of the Philosopher's Stone.
J.K. Rowling
#74. The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Philosopher's Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal. There
J.K. Rowling
#75. The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
Robert Trout
#76. The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep; for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the world of greater importance.
Henry Taylor
#77. Give the man of color an equal opportunity with the white, from the cradle to manhood, and from manhood to the grave, and you would discover the dignified statesman, the man of science, and the philosopher.
Maria W. Stewart
#78. Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire for them.
Joseph Addison
#79. What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
Henri Poincare
#80. My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.
David Mitchell
#81. Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
Evelyn Waugh
#83. The poet strips naked. The philosopher takes notes.
Marty Rubin
#84. The Philosopher, too, says of the wicked (Ethic. ix, 4) that "their soul is divided against itself ... one part pulls this way, another that"; and afterwards he concludes, saying: "If wickedness makes a man so miserable, he should strain every nerve to avoid vice.
Thomas Aquinas
#85. The intimate and the infinite are tangled together in this incandescent book, lit by Aristotle's bright spark of a daughter. Lucid even in nightmare, The Sweet Girl slips sideways around the philosopher to examine the lives of girls and women when we were not yet human.
Marina Endicott
#86. Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
Victor Hugo
#87. I have never seen the Philosopher's Stone that turns lead into Gold, but I have known the pursuit of it turn a Man's Gold into Lead.
Benjamin Franklin
#88. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
Michael Connelly
#89. You're of a mind with Mr. Staines.'
'Am I?'
'Yes,' Anna said. 'That is precisely the sort of thing that he would say.'
'Your Mr. Staines is quite the philosopher, Miss Wetherell.'
'Why, Reverend,' Anna said, smiling suddenly, 'I believe you've just paid yourself a compliment.
Eleanor Catton
#90. Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.
Simon Blackburn
#91. The Christian on his knees sees more than the philosopher on tiptoe. God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves.
Dwight L. Moody
#92. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
#93. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.
G.K. Chesterton
#94. What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#96. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. The difference between a poet and a philosopher is that the poet sees logically and describes basically the beauty whereas the philosopher defines the basics and shows the beauty of logics.
Anuj
#98. The philosopher's lecture room is a 'hospital': you ought not to walk out of it in a state of pleasure, but in pain; for you are not in good condition when you arrive.
Epictetus
#99. The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#100. We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.
Criss Jami
