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PHILOSOPHICAL QUOTES

Philosophical quotes offer condensed insights into humanity’s deepest questions. They invite reflection on how we think, live, and relate to the world around us. The following collection serves as a doorway to contemplation, curiosity, and quiet intellectual challenge.   ◀ Back
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And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.
- Jacques Derrida
Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
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Love gives you eyes.
- Peter Kreeft
Jesus-Shock
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Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.'
Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
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Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
- Fernando Pessoa
The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
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I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
- Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
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if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like
- Zeno
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In mathematics or physics, infinity is greater than one or two or any number countable. In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on ordered knowledge? You may be able to count this. But the truth is, you “really” don’t know. These possibilities in your mind hold a set of unpredictable orders. One effect may be causative of another of another. It could be a culmination of effects you know as events where events are sets and subsets of potential possibilities.
In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on unordered possibilities?
- Dew Platt
The Rudeness of Soul
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
- Heisenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
- Terry Eagleton
The Meaning of Life
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He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. "We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!" he cried.
- Edward Lewis Wallant
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Nothing was ordinary, since nothing had ever happened to me.
- Jacqueline Harpman
I Who Have Never Known Men
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There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.
- John Fraser
Violence in the Arts
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No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.
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All I'm trying to say is that if you're not willing to observe this, if you're just going to condemn it, you're never going to see it. It's there, whether you like it or not. This is stupid life-force we're dealing with here," he said. "Think how old it is, Jim. Think how huge it is. Understanding it doesn't make any difference.
- Jim Paul
Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.
- Martin MacInnes
In Ascension
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Man, consider first what the matter is (which you propose to do), then your own nature also, what it is able to bear. If you are a wrestler, look at your shoulders, your thighs, your loins: for different men are naturally formed for different things.
- Epictetus, Discourses
Discourses and Selected Writings of Epictetus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.
- Michael de Montaigne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many little people, in little places, doing little things, can change the world.
- Eduardo Galeano
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are the softness of the morning dew!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.
- Gilles Deleuze
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or safe.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Silence is nice to have if you wanted it, but maddening if you didn't.
- Daniel V Chappell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Whatever some people might say, it seems to me that a world in which I can fly, bend space and time, and meet with people who have been dead for years, deserves more consideration than it gets. If I weigh the waking world on one side of the scale and the dream world on the other, which one is more substantial? Doesn’t a world of endless possibilities seem more likely to contain the whole of our lives than the fraction of the world that we call real?
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.
- Jacques Derrida
Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love gives you eyes.
- Peter Kreeft
Jesus-Shock
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.'
Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
- Fernando Pessoa
The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
- Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like
- Zeno
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In mathematics or physics, infinity is greater than one or two or any number countable. In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on ordered knowledge? You may be able to count this. But the truth is, you “really” don’t know. These possibilities in your mind hold a set of unpredictable orders. One effect may be causative of another of another. It could be a culmination of effects you know as events where events are sets and subsets of potential possibilities.
In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on unordered possibilities?
- Dew Platt
The Rudeness of Soul
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
- Heisenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
- Terry Eagleton
The Meaning of Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. "We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!" he cried.
- Edward Lewis Wallant
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nothing was ordinary, since nothing had ever happened to me.
- Jacqueline Harpman
I Who Have Never Known Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.
- John Fraser
Violence in the Arts
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All I'm trying to say is that if you're not willing to observe this, if you're just going to condemn it, you're never going to see it. It's there, whether you like it or not. This is stupid life-force we're dealing with here," he said. "Think how old it is, Jim. Think how huge it is. Understanding it doesn't make any difference.
- Jim Paul
Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.
- Martin MacInnes
In Ascension
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man, consider first what the matter is (which you propose to do), then your own nature also, what it is able to bear. If you are a wrestler, look at your shoulders, your thighs, your loins: for different men are naturally formed for different things.
- Epictetus, Discourses
Discourses and Selected Writings of Epictetus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.
- Michael de Montaigne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many little people, in little places, doing little things, can change the world.
- Eduardo Galeano
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are the softness of the morning dew!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.
- Gilles Deleuze
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or safe.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Silence is nice to have if you wanted it, but maddening if you didn't.
- Daniel V Chappell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Whatever some people might say, it seems to me that a world in which I can fly, bend space and time, and meet with people who have been dead for years, deserves more consideration than it gets. If I weigh the waking world on one side of the scale and the dream world on the other, which one is more substantial? Doesn’t a world of endless possibilities seem more likely to contain the whole of our lives than the fraction of the world that we call real?
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.
- Jacques Derrida
Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love gives you eyes.
- Peter Kreeft
Jesus-Shock
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.'
Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.
- Fernando Pessoa
The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
- Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like
- Zeno
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In mathematics or physics, infinity is greater than one or two or any number countable. In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on ordered knowledge? You may be able to count this. But the truth is, you “really” don’t know. These possibilities in your mind hold a set of unpredictable orders. One effect may be causative of another of another. It could be a culmination of effects you know as events where events are sets and subsets of potential possibilities.
In how many ways can the world be destroyed based on unordered possibilities?
- Dew Platt
The Rudeness of Soul
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
- Heisenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
- Terry Eagleton
The Meaning of Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. "We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!" he cried.
- Edward Lewis Wallant
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nothing was ordinary, since nothing had ever happened to me.
- Jacqueline Harpman
I Who Have Never Known Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.
- John Fraser
Violence in the Arts
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All I'm trying to say is that if you're not willing to observe this, if you're just going to condemn it, you're never going to see it. It's there, whether you like it or not. This is stupid life-force we're dealing with here," he said. "Think how old it is, Jim. Think how huge it is. Understanding it doesn't make any difference.
- Jim Paul
Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.
- Martin MacInnes
In Ascension
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man, consider first what the matter is (which you propose to do), then your own nature also, what it is able to bear. If you are a wrestler, look at your shoulders, your thighs, your loins: for different men are naturally formed for different things.
- Epictetus, Discourses
Discourses and Selected Writings of Epictetus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.
- Michael de Montaigne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Many little people, in little places, doing little things, can change the world.
- Eduardo Galeano
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are the softness of the morning dew!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.
- Gilles Deleuze
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or safe.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Silence is nice to have if you wanted it, but maddening if you didn't.
- Daniel V Chappell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Whatever some people might say, it seems to me that a world in which I can fly, bend space and time, and meet with people who have been dead for years, deserves more consideration than it gets. If I weigh the waking world on one side of the scale and the dream world on the other, which one is more substantial? Doesn’t a world of endless possibilities seem more likely to contain the whole of our lives than the fraction of the world that we call real?
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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