TOPICS
SPEAKERS
HOME
BROWSE TOPICS
BROWSE SPEAKERS

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
...
44
45
46
47
48
 		...
From my low perch, I watch the world as it passes by on these dirty side streets. There are no westerners in this corner of the city. Just locals going about their business. Weighing out brightly colored spices, walking back from the fish market, stopping at the paan shop, socializing over tea. Old men in lungis and flip-flops walking hand in hand and dirty-faced children who are all bright smiles and wild eyes. I am comfortable here. Sitting on this board, in this tiny chai stall, hidden away from the recognizable world. For the moment, I have disappeared.
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 what is against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d like to be the moon in your sky.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Abundance is not the absence of scarcity; it is the presence of abundant mentality.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
While many explorers like to endure hardship by traveling to remote inhospitable parts of the world, I prefer to explore from the comfort of my own home.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?

a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?

or

b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?



Of course my answer is b).
- Jerry A. Coyne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy.
- Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn't be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too-the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people's lives in the course of living our own.
- Kevin Hearne
Shattered
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve’s innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice - the very worst - but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she acts without God breathing down her neck - all speak for her free will or, what amounts to the same thing, her margin for error. It is from this margin for error that freedom springs, because you can’t be free to right unless you can be free to be wrong.
- Robert Rowland Smith
Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…questioning the existence of God may begin because of one’s sense of disappointment rather than because of a line of reasoning. Disappointment can bring disillusionment, and disillusionment can get quite a grip on us. It may be the case that, next to the grip of disillusionment, whatever reasons we can think of to believe that God exists or that God is good will appear weak. So sometimes the reason we do not believe or the reason we stop believing is not the intellectual challenge to believing in God. Sometimes, the grip of disillusionment cannot be matched by things that seem to be only abstract or theoretical.
- Gregory E. Ganssle
Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Question everything, unless it's the answer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Always blow your own trumpet, blowing someone else’s is unhygienic
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
- Muriel Barbery
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three “essays” whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them.
- Jacques Derrida
Dissemination
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
- David Cronenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
- Jennifer Michael Hecht
Doubt: A History
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns.
- John Milton
Comus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
- Learned Hand
Spirit of Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tried to make my life colorful with basic colors Red, Green and Blue....... ohh god... my perfection in blending made it white !!! now again confused…. should go with :( or :)
- Saket Assertive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
- Richard Holbrooke
To End a War
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.
- Brock Clarke
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In sciences white people are not the pioneers, in philosophy white people are not the pioneers, in art and astrophysics whiteys are not the pioneers, in medicine and mathematics whiteys are not the pioneers, then how on earth did you come by this insane inkling that white people are the super race, how many bottles did you have, or did you bang your head against the rocks while making fire!
- Abhijit Naskar
Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
From my low perch, I watch the world as it passes by on these dirty side streets. There are no westerners in this corner of the city. Just locals going about their business. Weighing out brightly colored spices, walking back from the fish market, stopping at the paan shop, socializing over tea. Old men in lungis and flip-flops walking hand in hand and dirty-faced children who are all bright smiles and wild eyes. I am comfortable here. Sitting on this board, in this tiny chai stall, hidden away from the recognizable world. For the moment, I have disappeared.
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 what is against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d like to be the moon in your sky.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Abundance is not the absence of scarcity; it is the presence of abundant mentality.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
While many explorers like to endure hardship by traveling to remote inhospitable parts of the world, I prefer to explore from the comfort of my own home.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?

a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?

or

b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?



Of course my answer is b).
- Jerry A. Coyne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy.
- Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn't be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too-the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people's lives in the course of living our own.
- Kevin Hearne
Shattered
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve’s innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice - the very worst - but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she acts without God breathing down her neck - all speak for her free will or, what amounts to the same thing, her margin for error. It is from this margin for error that freedom springs, because you can’t be free to right unless you can be free to be wrong.
- Robert Rowland Smith
Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…questioning the existence of God may begin because of one’s sense of disappointment rather than because of a line of reasoning. Disappointment can bring disillusionment, and disillusionment can get quite a grip on us. It may be the case that, next to the grip of disillusionment, whatever reasons we can think of to believe that God exists or that God is good will appear weak. So sometimes the reason we do not believe or the reason we stop believing is not the intellectual challenge to believing in God. Sometimes, the grip of disillusionment cannot be matched by things that seem to be only abstract or theoretical.
- Gregory E. Ganssle
Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Question everything, unless it's the answer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Always blow your own trumpet, blowing someone else’s is unhygienic
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
- Muriel Barbery
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three “essays” whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them.
- Jacques Derrida
Dissemination
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
- David Cronenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
- Jennifer Michael Hecht
Doubt: A History
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns.
- John Milton
Comus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
- Learned Hand
Spirit of Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tried to make my life colorful with basic colors Red, Green and Blue....... ohh god... my perfection in blending made it white !!! now again confused…. should go with :( or :)
- Saket Assertive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
- Richard Holbrooke
To End a War
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.
- Brock Clarke
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In sciences white people are not the pioneers, in philosophy white people are not the pioneers, in art and astrophysics whiteys are not the pioneers, in medicine and mathematics whiteys are not the pioneers, then how on earth did you come by this insane inkling that white people are the super race, how many bottles did you have, or did you bang your head against the rocks while making fire!
- Abhijit Naskar
Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
From my low perch, I watch the world as it passes by on these dirty side streets. There are no westerners in this corner of the city. Just locals going about their business. Weighing out brightly colored spices, walking back from the fish market, stopping at the paan shop, socializing over tea. Old men in lungis and flip-flops walking hand in hand and dirty-faced children who are all bright smiles and wild eyes. I am comfortable here. Sitting on this board, in this tiny chai stall, hidden away from the recognizable world. For the moment, I have disappeared.
- Thomas Lloyd Qualls
Painted Oxen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 what is against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d like to be the moon in your sky.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Abundance is not the absence of scarcity; it is the presence of abundant mentality.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
While many explorers like to endure hardship by traveling to remote inhospitable parts of the world, I prefer to explore from the comfort of my own home.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?

a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?

or

b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?



Of course my answer is b).
- Jerry A. Coyne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy.
- Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn't be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too-the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people's lives in the course of living our own.
- Kevin Hearne
Shattered
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve’s innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice - the very worst - but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she acts without God breathing down her neck - all speak for her free will or, what amounts to the same thing, her margin for error. It is from this margin for error that freedom springs, because you can’t be free to right unless you can be free to be wrong.
- Robert Rowland Smith
Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…questioning the existence of God may begin because of one’s sense of disappointment rather than because of a line of reasoning. Disappointment can bring disillusionment, and disillusionment can get quite a grip on us. It may be the case that, next to the grip of disillusionment, whatever reasons we can think of to believe that God exists or that God is good will appear weak. So sometimes the reason we do not believe or the reason we stop believing is not the intellectual challenge to believing in God. Sometimes, the grip of disillusionment cannot be matched by things that seem to be only abstract or theoretical.
- Gregory E. Ganssle
Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Question everything, unless it's the answer
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Always blow your own trumpet, blowing someone else’s is unhygienic
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
- Muriel Barbery
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three “essays” whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them.
- Jacques Derrida
Dissemination
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.
- Criss Jami
Killosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.
- David Cronenberg
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
- Jennifer Michael Hecht
Doubt: A History
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns.
- John Milton
Comus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
- Learned Hand
Spirit of Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I tried to make my life colorful with basic colors Red, Green and Blue....... ohh god... my perfection in blending made it white !!! now again confused…. should go with :( or :)
- Saket Assertive
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
- Richard Holbrooke
To End a War
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.
- Brock Clarke
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In sciences white people are not the pioneers, in philosophy white people are not the pioneers, in art and astrophysics whiteys are not the pioneers, in medicine and mathematics whiteys are not the pioneers, then how on earth did you come by this insane inkling that white people are the super race, how many bottles did you have, or did you bang your head against the rocks while making fire!
- Abhijit Naskar
Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...
44
45
46
47
48
 		...