Top 100 To Be A Philosopher Quotes
#1. Philosophy is so interesting and intriguing that it is almost boring not to be a philosopher.
Debasish Mridha
#2. 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
#3. Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.
Jacques Derrida
#4. One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.
Criss Jami
#5. To be a philosopher you do not need to be a professor but you do have to love and understand nature.
Debasish Mridha
#6. To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told ... and have a sense of humor doing it.
Criss Jami
#7. I make no claim to be a philosopher, but this much I have observed: that whenever a thing seems at its zenith, you may be sure its destruction has already started.
Robert Harris
#8. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness was always breaking in.
Oliver Edwards
#9. It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.
Anton Chekhov
#10. A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#11. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
#12. How easy it is, Doctor, to be a philosopher on paper, and how difficult in real life!
Anton Chekhov
#13. People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
Albert Camus
#14. You don't need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.
Isaac Asimov
#15. So the highest and the happiest of endeavors is to be a philosopher ? Doesn't it seem self-serving for a philosopher to make that claim?
Irvin D. Yalom
#16. What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events?
Epictetus
#17. I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
Shan Sa
#18. To be a philosopher ... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure.....Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician.
Charles Sorel
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. if a philosopher wishes to be useful to human society, he must announce a God.
Voltaire
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of any one, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be contented, then, in everything, with being a philosopher; and if you with to seem so likewise to any one, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you.
Epictetus
#27. But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.
Eleanor Herman
#28. Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Thomas Aquinas
#29. The philosopher's conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men's, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws.
Henry David Thoreau
#30. The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable; and to appeal to it on all occasions savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or a philosopher.
John Ramsay McCulloch
#31. I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.
Jonathan Swift
#32. The philosopher should be a man willing to listen to every suggestion,but determined to judge for himself.He should not be a respector of persons,but of things.Truth should be his primary object.
Michael Faraday
#33. From the philosopher Catulus, never to be dismissive of a friend's accusation, even if it seems unreasonable, but to make every effort to restore the relationship to its normal condition.
Marcus Aurelius
#34. One day, a philosopher asked, "What is the purpose of creation?" "Lovemaking," said the Master. Later, to his disciples, he said, "Before creation, love was. After creation, love was made. When love is consummated, creation will cease to be, and love will be forever."
Anthony De Mello
#35. There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
Walter Dean Myers
#36. Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
Robert Lynd
#37. I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.
Edward St. Aubyn
#39. I don't pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.
Josef Koudelka
#40. Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?
Socrates
#41. My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates
#42. The great philosopher, Aristotle had this to say in regards to criticism. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.
L.A. Hilden
#43. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#44. Can an ass be tragic?
To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.
Daniel M. Gilbert
#46. What decent philosopher was ever an appeaser? The former is a rare catch among the multitudes of modern opinionists. His role is to be one who loves truth. That is a place where his love for humanity is more powerful than his love for hot air about empowering humanity.
Criss Jami
#47. To be a colored man in America ... and enjoy it, you must be greatly daring, greatly stolid, greatly humorous and greatly sensitive. And at all times a philosopher ...
Jessie Redmon Fauset
#48. There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
William James
#49. Above all the genuine philosopher will generally seek lucidity and clarity and will always strive not to be like a turbid, raging, rain-swollen stream, but much more like a Swiss lake, which, in its peacefulness, combines great depth with a great clarity that just reveals its great depth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#50. Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#51. a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In
John Williams
#52. Being able to make friends and keep them, welcoming others and sharing with them, a guide, philosopher and friend. One like this will be praised.
Gautama Buddha
#53. If you wish to be a writer; write!
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Epictetus (50-120) Greek philosopher.
Epictetus
#54. He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.
Socrates
#55. Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.
Robert Heilbroner
#56. A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to ... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.
J.M.G. Le Clezio
#57. To be a good traveler argues one no ordinary philosopher. A sweet landscape must sometimes be allowed to atone for an indifferent supper, and an interesting ruin charm away the remembrance of a hard bed.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#58. Earnshaw was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.
Emily Bronte
#59. Aristotle says that in order to live alone one must either be an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking. A man must be both; a philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. In order to be a really good investor, you need to be a little bit of a philosopher as well.
Daniel S. Loeb
#61. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#62. A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.
Alice Stone Blackwell
#63. He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#64. 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
#65. To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
#66. Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
John Dewey
#67. Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be achieved through science and technology steered by human values.
Ray Kurzweil
#68. The champion of justice [ ... ] would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds, and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all.
Plato
#69. No mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew's fifty years of antitheological writings.
Antony Flew
#70. Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
George Bernard Shaw
#71. 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
#72. A philosopher is a mathematician, who might not be good at solving mathematical problems but knows 'which one' to solve and 'why' to solve it...
Victor Ghoshe
#73. I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.
Mattie Stepanek
#74. That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
Aldo Leopold
#75. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. Galen went so far as to assert that no one could be a good doctor unless they were also a philosopher, and he prided himself, with justification, on his own philosophical ability.
Brad Inwood
#77. 'But the man who is ready to taste every form of knowledge, is glad to learn and never satisfied - he's the man who deserves to be called a philosopher, isn't he?'
Plato
#78. To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
#80. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.
Epictetus
#81. In Old English they don't say I had a dream, but there's another usage of the word - "life is but a dream," to be corny about it. It's implied with eyes wide open, rather than asleep. But I'm not a philosopher to explain myself. I wish I could. Maybe that's why I'm a musician.
Tom Verlaine
#82. Jesus would be another wise man or philosopher like Socrates if it were not for three words. With the declaration of these words the message of the good news of Jesus Christ changed from "fanatical audacity", to the fantastic reality of a reconciled relationship and eternal hope. "HE IS RISEN!
Tom Barton
#83. Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher's system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists - in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought. At a conference approximately
Irvin D. Yalom
#84. Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
Bertrand Russell
#85. Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don't be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don't pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but you are too serious, you cannot open your heart.
Osho
#86. Great American thinker and philosopher Earl Nightingale said, "If you spend one extra hour each day in the study of your chosen field, you'll be a national expert in five years or less." What do you want to be an expert in?
Abby Beale
#87. This seems plainly absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. One
Bertrand Russell
#88. The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity.
Victor Hugo
#89. Whoever is so stupid as to imagine God to be either masculine or feminine openly shows that he is as bad a philosopher as a theologian.
Marie De Gournay
#90. Democracy should always be viewed with a philosophical perspective rather than a political one, because after all democracy was born to a philosopher and murdered by a politician.
Aysha Taryam
#91. Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?
David Hume
#92. When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk he said, Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.
Seneca.
#93. But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.
Daniel Bell
#94. A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages ... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.
Thomas Reid
#95. Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest
John N. Gray
#96. I came for the cause. Since I could not help, at least don't let me remember that I hindered it. I've learned how to manage on the ship; it will be nothing, after all this. Goodbye, Niko. You have made me a truer philosopher. Go with God.
Mary Renault
#97. There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.
Giacomo Leopardi
#98. I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#99. There's no answer that ends the search, you know. Obviously, there never will be. The artist seeks to capture the world because the nature of every single object is a mystery to him. The philosopher addresses human nature because he's a stranger to every part of it. It
Ethan Canin
#100. To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
Blaise Pascal
