Philosophy Quotes

Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality.

~ Carl Sagan

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. Can they be brought together? This is a practical question. We must get down to it. I despise intelligence really means: I cannot bear my doubts.

~ Albert Camus

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

~ Confucius

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

~ Judy Blume

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

~ Plato

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

~ Albert Einstein

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

~ Charles Bukowski

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

~ Bruce Lee

You didn't kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn't kill him.So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.

~ Tamora Pierce

If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.

~ Keith Richards

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

~ Stephen Fry

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.

~ Bill Hicks

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

~ Ayn Rand

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

~ J.k. Rowling

Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.

~ Norton Juster

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

~ Heraclitus

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

~ Thomas Jefferson

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

~ Ayn Rand

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

~ Aristotle

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.

~ Daniel Keyes

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

~ Alan W. Watts

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.

~ Epictetus

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

~ Albert Einstein

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.

~ Philip K. Dick

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

~ Lauren Oliver

If you understand others you are smart.If you understand yourself you are illuminated.If you overcome others you are powerful.If you overcome yourself you have strength.If you know how to be satisfied you are rich.If you can act with vigor, you have a will.If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting.If you die without loss, you are eternal.

~ Lao Tzu

belief is the death of intelligence.

~ Robert Anton Wilson

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

~ Bertrand Russell

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

~ Douglas Coupland

One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

~ Plato

The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.

~ Dan Millman

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

~ Woody Allen

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.

~ Jostein Gaarder