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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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We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
- Alan Moore
Watchmen
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The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.
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Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
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The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.
- Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
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I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
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We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
- Parmenides
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Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."

Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
- W Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil
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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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
- Theodor W. Adorno
Aesthetic Theory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
- Herbert Marcuse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
- Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
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We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.
- Naoki Higashida
The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am what some would say 'holy, and wholly other than you.' The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn't much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I'm not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.
- William P. Young
The Shack
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the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
- bacon
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To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
- Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
- Søren Kierkegaard
The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard
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Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
- John Dewey
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All is flux
- Heraclitus
The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature with an Introduction Historical and Critical
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
- Colin Meloy
Wildwood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
- Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
- Alan Moore
Watchmen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.
- Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
- Parmenides
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."

Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
- W Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
- Theodor W. Adorno
Aesthetic Theory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
- Herbert Marcuse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
- Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.
- Naoki Higashida
The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am what some would say 'holy, and wholly other than you.' The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn't much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I'm not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.
- William P. Young
The Shack
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
- bacon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
- Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
- Søren Kierkegaard
The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
- John Dewey
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All is flux
- Heraclitus
The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature with an Introduction Historical and Critical
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
- Colin Meloy
Wildwood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
- Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
- Alan Moore
Watchmen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.
- Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
- Parmenides
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."

Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
- W Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
- Theodor W. Adorno
Aesthetic Theory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
- Herbert Marcuse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
- Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.
- Naoki Higashida
The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I am what some would say 'holy, and wholly other than you.' The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn't much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I'm not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.
- William P. Young
The Shack
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
- bacon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
- Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
- Søren Kierkegaard
The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.
- John Dewey
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All is flux
- Heraclitus
The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature with an Introduction Historical and Critical
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
- Colin Meloy
Wildwood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
- Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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16
17
18
19
 		...