Philosophy Quotes

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.”
― Edith Södergran

“Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.”
― Christopher Paolini, Brisingr

“No man was ever wise by chance”
― Seneca

“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

“I cannot compromise my respect for your love. You can keep your love, I will keep my respect.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.”
― Epicurus

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”
― Sophocles

“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.”
― Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Always forgive, but never forget, else you will be a prisoner of your own hatred, and doomed to repeat your mistakes forever.”
― Wil Zeus, Sun Beyond the Clouds

“The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.”
― Malcolm X

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
― Joseph Brodsky

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”
― Carl Sagan