Philosophy Quotes

I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.

~ Orhan Pamuk

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker

~ Malcolm X

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

~ George Orwell

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

~ Babe Ruth

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

~ Albert Camus

People know what they do, frequently they know why they do what they do, but what they don't know is what what they do does.

~ Michel Foucault

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

~ George Orwell

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing--I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.

~ Yann Martel

It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

~ Stephen Hawking

The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.

~ Lao Tzu

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

~ Robertson Davies

There are no ordinary moments.

~ Dan Millman

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

~ Aristotle

Take it easy, but take it.

~ Woody Guthrie

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

~ Alan W. Watts

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

The menu is not the meal.

~ Alan W. Watts

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

~ Ayn Rand

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.

~ George S. Patton Jr.

The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.

~ Epictetus

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

~ Pierre Dos Utt

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

~ Vladimir Lenin

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.

~ Albert Camus

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

~ Richard Feynman

A cult is a religion with no political power.

~ Tom Wolfe

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

~ Albert Einstein

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

~ Leon Trotsky

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

~ Bertrand Russell

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

~ Arthur Miller

The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.

~ Norton Juster

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

~ Albert Camus

We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion

~ ;T.s. Eliot

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via - There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

~ Seneca

I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.

~ Aristotle