Philosophy Quotes

Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents. Translation by Sharon Lebell

~ Epictetus

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

~ William James

If you reveal your secrets to the wind,you should not blame the wind forrevealing them to the trees.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.

~ Sun Tzu

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

~ William S. Burroughs

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

~ Alain De Botton

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

~ Plato

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

~ William Blake

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

~ Alice Walker

Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.

~ Heraclitus

Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.

~ Brent Weeks

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

~ David Foster Wallace

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Fair speech may hide a foul heart.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.

~ Lisa Lutz

Who is John Galt?

~ Ayn Rand

I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

~ Ayn Rand

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

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

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.

~ Gautama Buddha

Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.

~ Lao Tzu

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

~ Jostein Gaarder

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

~ Carl Sagan

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

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

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

~ Zhuangzi

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 Dostoyevsky

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

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

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

~ Marcus Aurelius

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein