Philosophers Quotes

For the philosopher, language, thought, and passion are the same. Ideas are personal to a philosopher; they express their human passion and articulate their novel ideas in language. Ideas are more than mere concepts, trifles that the philosophical mind toys with. Ideas provide both the structure and inner vitality that holds great thinkers’ conceptual structure together.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I don’t even pretend to believe I know everything; I just believe in arguments God told me I had a pretty good chance of winning, while I was traveling through hell.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Never be content with your work, your relationships, your life. That's the stupid advice philosophers give today.

~ Marty Rubin

Do not afraid of your previous mistakes, try to fix them.

~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.

~ Jerry A. Fodor

Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture.

~ Criss Jami

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.

~ David Brewster

There is a present because it works with my theories. If you find a better one than mine, then I may reconsider, but for the sake of the universe—and oh, how we philosophers make the universe weep—there is a present, and it is the time you just left.

~ Mary-Jean Harris

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

Do not drown yourself into fantasy, whatever you can do, do it now, do not wait for tomorrow to come.

~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

Do a bit research before you plan.

~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the medium of the most perfect exchange between us, henceforth and forever, the indestructible, the unchangeable, the universal currency of good will and peace, and this, my brothers and sisters, is a currency that is not interchangeable with silver and gold, it is a currency of the heart, of the good life, of the highest estate on the earth.

~ Virchand Gandhi

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

~ Nicholas Murray Butler

Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.

~ Marty Rubin

The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat, which isn’t really there. And the definition of a theologian is he’s somebody who finds it.

~ Michael Ruse

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

~ Mark Rothko

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

~ Aristotle

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

~ Hans Reichenbach

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

~ Samuel Beckett

There are poets,there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Philosophers tell you what they think. Artists show you.

~ Marty Rubin

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

~ Gian-Carlo Rota