Philosophy Quotes

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years.

~ Stefan Molyneux

I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.

~ Jean Cocteau

Language is a social art.

~ Willard Van Orman Quine

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls.

~ Dean Koontz

Not just charity, even corruption begins at home.

~ K. Hari Kumar

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

~ Bertrand Russell

I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody.

~ Percy Williams Bridgman

..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance.

~ Will Durant

Cos there's holes in this world,see. Holes. And the likes of Thommo, and Keith, and me, and Kenny, we just sort of fall through em. We weren't never bad kids, we just didn't have nothing to hold on to, that's all.

~ Ian Ayris

Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.

~ Thomas Aquinas

With their concern for personal autonomy and individual freedom, anarchists more than any other socialists are aware of the inhumanity of both physical punishment and manipulative cure for anti-social members of the community. They look to reasoned argument and friendly treatment to deal with criminals and wish to respect their humanity and individuality.

~ Peter Marshall

But here's the most incredible thing about it: the philosopher isn't proposing that as a concept; he's simply articulating what humans believe about themselves. That first they thing and therefore then they exist.What follows on from that is even worse: that since humans live that way, thinking that first they thing and then they exist, they also think that anything that doesn't think, also doesn't fully exist. Trees, the sea, the fish in the sea, the sun, the moon, a hill or a whole mountain range. None of that exists all the way; it exists on a second plane of existence, a lesser existence. Therefore, it deserves to be merchandise or food or background for humans and nothing more.

~ Sabina Berman

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.

~ Janet Fitch

Socrates once said, The unexamined life is not worth living. I would expand on his thought by suggesting, The unexamined society is not worth living in.

~ Eileen Workman

Unfortunately, we-especially in the United States-have become increasingly mechanized, so that today we feel very strongly that if we can take anything out of human hands and especially out of the human heart and put it through a machine, we have made progress. Indeed, we flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, while not always pausing to reflect that in the process we have also succeeded in making millions of human beings who can feel and think like machines. It is a sorry reflection.

~ Ashley Montagu

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own value to live by, and the same holds true with me.

~ Haruki Murakami

The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.

~ Nicolás Gómez Dávila

When YOU stop believing one person in the world cannot make a difference, differences in the world will be made.

~ Kellie Elmore

This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Humans, I finally decided after a few more minutes of watching him, are paradoxically capable of both unattainable depths of kindness and unimaginable depths of cruelty, sometimes within the same body...

~ Kiley Macleod

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

~ Christopher Hill

I wanted to evaluate my own escape from the crowds in 5 different stages so that I could clarify my thoughts and help my readers get more benefits.(1) Getting away from the media(2) Getting away from the big city(3) Going to nature as a life style(4) Getting away from the social media(5) Being only with people I want

~ Korel Eraybar

I'm not constantly looking for the right in my thoughts. I am, actually, scared of absolute “rights”. Therefore, I don't think my book will appeal to people who seek concrete formulas from me to be happy and who have designed their lives mechanically. But I do believe my book can give something to people who live their lives going from information to information like a bee, who depend on their own syntheses as the outcomes and have flexible thought, and who could be an individual.

~ Korel Eraybar

Getting away from the media was the first step of breaking away from the crowds, and let me clearly state, not in 1 day, 5 days, 10 days but in 4-5 months, I started to feel relief in myself, and I had the ability to think more positively about the things I experienced. I know that there are millions of people around me who believe that following current events and knowing them, as I did once, is an important thing. Besides, I also know that they are the millions of people who have not been able to build their own world yet.

~ Korel Eraybar

The true essence of vedanta focuses upon subject rather than object.

~ Pawan Parashar

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

~ Sam Harris

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.

~ Erich Fromm

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.

~ Erich Fromm

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

~ Erich Fromm

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.

~ Erich Fromm

Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains — except kill it.

~ Erich Fromm

The child starts out by being attached to his mother as the ground of all being. He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise, and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother. In the history of the human race we see—and can anticipate—the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.

~ Erich Fromm

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

~ Erich Fromm

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.

~ Erich Fromm

When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.

~ Erich Fromm

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence.Only in this central experience is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.

~ Erich Fromm

Psychology at best tells us how things are, not how they are supposed to be!

~ Zal

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.

~ Erich Fromm

...knowing often felt preferable to not knowing. It provided the illusion of control.

~ Jordan Castillo Price

Do Not Dictate a Child through Someone, it Ruins the Child's Experience.

~ Vineet Raj Kapoor