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As my old philosophy professor once told me, even if you hate philosophy, that is, in fact, also philosophizing. Boy, I truly wasn’t too excited about that! However, some years passed, and I understood what he meant by that - philosophy is always there, whether you wish for it or not. And, thinking of it, there’s probably no other way of trying to explain the unexplainable than by using principles of philosophy where some exquisitely insightful person has put all your intangible and incoherent thoughts into one sentence, at least somewhat explaining humans, life, and all the burning questions stemming out of these topics. So, here we are, with our list of the best philosophy quotes that might spark your interest in this science or rekindle the fire you already have for it.
Surely, it is best to start your journey of understanding things with the words of the great philosophers like Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and Socrates. These are all names you will surely find mentioned in this article. However, not only philosophers have had some insights into the universe, so you might also expect to find some unexpected names like Frank Zappa, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan, who also contributed to the world of philosophy. All in all, it is a pretty comprehensive collection of philosophy quotes, whether you’re just a newbie or a bona fide scholar.
So, prepare to be blown away by these clever quotes you’re about to find just a scroll below! Once you are there, vote for the deep quotes that gave you something to think about, and share this article with your friends, too!
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#1
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
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#2
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” – Socrates
#3
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ― Carl Sagan
#4
“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
#5
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” ― Marcus Aurelius
#6
“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
#7
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” ― Socrates
#9
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ― Mark Twain
Cubbypotato 2 years ago
I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it
#10
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
#11
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
#13
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” ― Alan Watts
#15
“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” ― Santosh Kalwar
#16
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” ― Oscar Wilde
#17
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
#19
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” ― William Shakespear
#20
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#21
“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
#22
“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
#23
“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” ― Malcolm X
#24
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” ― Plato
#25
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” ― Gilles Deleuze
#26
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” – Denis Diderot
#28
“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.” ― Noam Chomsky
#29
“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.” ― Stephen Hawking
#30
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
#31
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” ― Carl Sagan
#33
“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” ― Freidrich Neitzsche
#34
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” ― Dylan Thomas
#37
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato
#38
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” – Bertrand Russell
Cwc Connie 2 years ago
I hope I would die to fight antisemitism. Fight for my children and christianity.
#40
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” – René Descartes
#42
“Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire.” – Epictetus
#43
“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” ― Plato
#44
“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.” ― Epictetus
#45
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” ― George Orwell
#46
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ― Kahlil Gibran
#47
“You do not write your life with words... You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.” ― Patrick Ness
#49
“A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” ― William Blake
#50
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is the question of whether to live.” – Albert Camus
#51
“This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.” – Bertrand Russell
#52
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
#53
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.” – Francis Bacon
#54
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.” – Immanuel Kant
#55
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.” – John Locke
#56
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” ― Karl Marx
#57
"There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.” ― Seneca
#59
“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.” ― Hans Urs von Balthasar
#60
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli
#61
“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.” ― Albert Camus
#62
“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” — John Stuart Mill
#63
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead
#64
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” ― Albert Camus
#65
“Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” ― Lao Tzu
#68
“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.” ― D.H. Lawrence
Karmijn van Bohemen 2 years ago
I don 't know who this is but I bet it's a man. If so I will bring out my femenist hat and ask him about certain events in the US
#69
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
#73
“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
Scott Crowell 2 years ago
I highly doubt this. My daughter is constantly explaining things to me.
#74
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
#75
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” ― Gabriel García Márquez
#76
“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.” ― Bruce Lee
#78
“Time is a game played beautifully by children.” ― Heraclitus
#79
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.” – Jeremy Bentham
#80
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.” – René Descartes
#82
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky
#84
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel
#87
“Have you ever noticed how ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision to make?” ― Terry Johnson
#88
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” ― Laurence J. Peter
#89
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” ― Richard Dawkins
#90
“The past has no power over the present moment.” ― Eckhart Tolle
#91
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
#92
“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
#93
“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
#94
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
#95
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein
#96
“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
#97
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ― Albert Einstein
#98
“Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, "Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?"
Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, "We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.” ― Charles M. Schulz
#99
“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
#101
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” ― Alan Wilson Watts
#102
“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.” ― Rollo May
#103
“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
#106
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.” – Bertrand Russell
#108
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.” – Immanuel Kant
#109
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” – Aristotle
#110
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
#111
“If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.” – Baruch Spinoza
#113
“It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” – W. K. Clifford
#114
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature.” – John Locke
#115
“To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.” – John Stuart Mill
#116
“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.” ― Norton Juster
#117
“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
#118
“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.” ― Harlan Ellison
#119
“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
#120
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” — Mahatma Gandhi
#121
“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.” ― May Sarton
#122
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
#123
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” ― Dr. Seuss
#124
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” ― Albert Einstein
#125
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” ― J.K.Rowling
#126
“You only live twice: once when you are born, and once when you look death in the face.” ― Ian Fleming
#127
“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson
#128
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, painting, writing, conducting, yoga, gambling, drinking, Buddha, Christ, 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
#129
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” ― Ayn Rand
#130
“If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.” ― Keith Richards
#131
“I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
#135
“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
#136
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.” ― Albert Einstein
#137
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” ― Aristotle
#138
“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
#139
“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
#140
“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
Ewan McInnes 2 years ago
As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand's philosophy generally, I agree with this quote
#141
“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.” ― Ludwig van Beethoven
#142
“Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.” ― Sam Harris
#143
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” ― Bertrand Russell
#144
“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?” ― Haruki Murakami
#147
“God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
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