Philosophy Quotes

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

~ Haruki Murakami

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,'said the dewdrop to the lake.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.

~ Terry Pratchett

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

~ Sam Harris

Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.

~ Albert Camus

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

~ Stephen Hawking

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

~ Flannery O'connor

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

~ Elie Wiesel

Calvin:It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?Television: ...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet

~ Bill Watterson

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

~ Peter Kreeft

I’ve always hated the “Who are you? question. This is a philosophical inquiry. Answering that question is why we’re on earth. You can’t answer it in thirty seconds or in an elevator.

~ Sandy Nathan

A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

~ Samuel Beckett

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

~ Wallace Stevens

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

~ Edmund Husserl

Death isn't the end, it's the beginning.

~ Jennifer Love Hewitt

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.

~ Lin Yutang

Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.

~ W.n.p. Barbellion

All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

~ John Rawls

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

~ Plato

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

~ Douglas Adams

Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking, You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.

~ Cindy Ross

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

~ Ken Kesey

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

~ Terry Pratchett

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

~ Guy Debord

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

~ Thomas Aquinas

Here is my final point. About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography and smoking and everything else. What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I fuck, what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet?

~ Bill Hicks

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.

~ Ayn Rand

Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.

~ Amish Tripathi

If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means they are going to commit same mistake again they just apologized for.

~ Amit Kalantri

Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.

~ Epictetus

If you're not happy in life then you need to change, calibrate, readjust...flush your negative energy and fill it with positive energy; How do we do that you might ask? well I would start by making others happy, deseases are not the only thing that spreads easy. We are all connected in some form of unseen energy... think how those around you will impact you and make you feel if they were happy?

~ Al Munoz

As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.

~ Albert Camus

In presence of the Moon nobody sees stars.

~ Amit Kalantri

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this, the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

~ Slavoj Žižek