Philosophy Quotes

You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.

~ Frédéric Gros

Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world.

~ Frédéric Gros

When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.

~ Frédéric Gros

forest paths – flat labyrinths – and gentle plains invite the walker’s body to softness, to languor. And memories arise like eddying mists. The air is more bracing with Nietzsche, and above all sharp, transparent. The thought is trenchant, the body wide awake, trembling.

~ Frédéric Gros

Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.

~ Frédéric Gros

In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy’.

~ Frédéric Gros

And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.

~ Frédéric Gros

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind’s ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free.

~ Neel Burton

I just want to live in a way that either wakes people up or shakes people up. Whether I have opened a wound or opened a heart, I have touched a life and helped bring a change.

~ Nikki Rowe

The purpose of the state is really freedom.

~ Baruch Spinoza

No rules for the rulers is tyranny for the subjects. Freedom for politicians is enslavement for citizens.

~ Stefan Molyneux

I wouldn’t want freedom all the time but it’s nice to know it’s attainable

~ Denis Hickey

And I know just’s well as anybody that if you control a man’s space and time then you control his whole goddamn life: he’s a goner, cause hell, there ain’t nothin’ for him to do in space and time but make the few choices he can make with what he got.

~ Nicholas Hochstedler

Well old man, I guess freedom's a continuum.

~ Nicholas Hochstedler

I will feel no guilt on shutting my door to those who didn't listen.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The men sit around getting fat and arguing with each other about something they call “philosophy” - most of which is pure nonsense.

~ David Eddings

Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

All I have is me, myself and I and we are all getting really tired of each other.

~ Carl R White

If it’s taking to long to get up the career ladder, get a career lift.

~ Benny Bellamacina

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

~ Neel Burton

That things are status quo is the catastrophe.

~ Walter Benjamin

News Flash!All politicians arms are going to be lengthened so that they will be able to pat themselves on the back for doing a great job.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

The rights of the individual are more important than the wishes of the masses.

~ J.adam Snyder

In the ideal state, laws are few and simple. In the corrupt state, they are many and confused.

~ J.adam Snyder

Eddie and Jim both said it was a great thing the Russians were winning because the strongest team should win. Shannon thought the fascist philosophy was a very comfortable one. You simply cheered for the winner, who proved by virtue of winning that he should have won. No analysis, no doubts, no troubling moral questions.

~ Helen Potrebenko

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

~ George Macdonald Fraser

And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’ ‘To make them confess.’ ‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’ ‘To punish them.’ ‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?

~ George Orwell

Why is it so many politicians are wealthy?Is it because they make good investments?Or is it simply.Because they are good investments?

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Democracy is an illusion in which we all believe.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

I was born a sheep & I cannot be a goat through pledge of hands.

~ Ymatruz

The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.

~ Roger Scruton

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.

~ David Brooks

Your moral values & ability to rationalize, not your religious beliefs or political affiliations define what you should stand for in society.

~ Mamur Mustapha

Fundamentalism of any kind, be it religious, atheistic, political or educational, is the greatest threat to human excellence – it is a threat to progress – it is a threat to greatness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

We need not be surprised at this. On a wrong road, inconsistency is inevitable; if it were not so, mankind would be sacrificed. A false principle never has been, and never will be, carried out to the end.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

It is even so in a commonwealth and in the councils of princes; if ill opinions cannot be quite rooted out, and you cannot cure some received vice according to your wishes, you must not, therefore, abandon the commonwealth, for the same reasons as you should not forsake the ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds. You are not obliged to assault people with discourses that are out of their road, when you see that their received notions must prevent your making an impression upon them: you ought rather to cast about and to manage things with all the dexterity in your power, so that, if you are not able to make them go well, they may be as little ill as possible; for, except all men were good, everything cannot be right, and that is a blessing that I do not at present hope to see.

~ Thomas More

I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust—What is it, but a miserably mortifying detail of crimes and follies?—of the guilt of a few, and the sufferings of many, while almost every page offers an argument in favor of what I never will believe—that heaven created the human race only to destroy itself.

~ Charlotte Turner Smith

Every animal is biologically designed by Nature to do wrong in return. It takes a human being to not do wrong in return.

~ Abhijit Naskar