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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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If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.
- Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.
- Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Edith Sitwell
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Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
- John O'Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace – A Spiritual Homecoming Through Celtic Traditions, Art, Music, and Divine Grace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So, let me get this straight-- You want me to stop being a lesbian and being attracted to women because it is a 'sin'? Last time I checked, when you lie you are sinning. Sure, I could tell you I am no longer a lesbian or that I am no longer attracted to women and am straight, or I could even tell you the moon is made of cheese. I could tell you many things, but the moon will still not be made of cheese, and I will still not be attracted to men. I could tell you a lie in order to placate you, but isn’t the truth supposed to set me free? I choose truth over lies any day of the week.
- Cristina Marrero
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
- John Rawls
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
- Marquis de Sade
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…
- William S. Burroughs
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Civilize The Mind, But Make Savage The Body.
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
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Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
- John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What's the use of complaining about something you have no intentions of changing it?
- Mario L Castellanos
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
- W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
- Francis Bacon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively (yathābhūtam). It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
- Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is a Humanism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man looks on woman from his vantage point and reduces her to a being that is not for-itself but for-him.
- Bonnie Burstow
Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
BLACK AND WHITE


I was born into
A religion of Light,
But with so many other
Religions and
Philosophies,
How do I know which
ONE
Is right?

Is it not
My birthright
To seek out the light?
To find Truth
After surveying all the proof,
Am I supposed
To love
Or fight?
And why do all those who
Try to guide me,
Always start by dividing
And multiplying me –
From what they consider
Wrong or right?
I thought,
There were no walls
For whoever beams truth and light.
And how can one speak on Light's behalf,
lf all they do
Is act black,
But talk WHITE?
- Suzy Kassem
Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Step out of my sunlight.
- Diogenes Laertius
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.
- David Gerrold
The Man Who Folded Himself
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.
- Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.
- Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Edith Sitwell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
- John O'Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace – A Spiritual Homecoming Through Celtic Traditions, Art, Music, and Divine Grace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So, let me get this straight-- You want me to stop being a lesbian and being attracted to women because it is a 'sin'? Last time I checked, when you lie you are sinning. Sure, I could tell you I am no longer a lesbian or that I am no longer attracted to women and am straight, or I could even tell you the moon is made of cheese. I could tell you many things, but the moon will still not be made of cheese, and I will still not be attracted to men. I could tell you a lie in order to placate you, but isn’t the truth supposed to set me free? I choose truth over lies any day of the week.
- Cristina Marrero
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
- John Rawls
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
- Marquis de Sade
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…
- William S. Burroughs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Civilize The Mind, But Make Savage The Body.
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
- John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What's the use of complaining about something you have no intentions of changing it?
- Mario L Castellanos
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
- W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
- Francis Bacon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively (yathābhūtam). It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
- Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is a Humanism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man looks on woman from his vantage point and reduces her to a being that is not for-itself but for-him.
- Bonnie Burstow
Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
BLACK AND WHITE


I was born into
A religion of Light,
But with so many other
Religions and
Philosophies,
How do I know which
ONE
Is right?

Is it not
My birthright
To seek out the light?
To find Truth
After surveying all the proof,
Am I supposed
To love
Or fight?
And why do all those who
Try to guide me,
Always start by dividing
And multiplying me –
From what they consider
Wrong or right?
I thought,
There were no walls
For whoever beams truth and light.
And how can one speak on Light's behalf,
lf all they do
Is act black,
But talk WHITE?
- Suzy Kassem
Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Step out of my sunlight.
- Diogenes Laertius
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.
- David Gerrold
The Man Who Folded Himself
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.
- Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.
- Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Edith Sitwell
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
- John O'Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace – A Spiritual Homecoming Through Celtic Traditions, Art, Music, and Divine Grace
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So, let me get this straight-- You want me to stop being a lesbian and being attracted to women because it is a 'sin'? Last time I checked, when you lie you are sinning. Sure, I could tell you I am no longer a lesbian or that I am no longer attracted to women and am straight, or I could even tell you the moon is made of cheese. I could tell you many things, but the moon will still not be made of cheese, and I will still not be attracted to men. I could tell you a lie in order to placate you, but isn’t the truth supposed to set me free? I choose truth over lies any day of the week.
- Cristina Marrero
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
- Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
- John Rawls
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
- Marquis de Sade
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…
- William S. Burroughs
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Civilize The Mind, But Make Savage The Body.
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
- John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What's the use of complaining about something you have no intentions of changing it?
- Mario L Castellanos
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
- W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
- Francis Bacon
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively (yathābhūtam). It does not falsely lull you into living in a fool's paradise, nor does it frighten and agonize you with all kinds of imaginary fears and sins. It tells you exactly and objectively what you are and what the world around you is, and shows you the way to perfect freedom, peace, tranquility and happiness.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
- Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is a Humanism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man looks on woman from his vantage point and reduces her to a being that is not for-itself but for-him.
- Bonnie Burstow
Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
BLACK AND WHITE


I was born into
A religion of Light,
But with so many other
Religions and
Philosophies,
How do I know which
ONE
Is right?

Is it not
My birthright
To seek out the light?
To find Truth
After surveying all the proof,
Am I supposed
To love
Or fight?
And why do all those who
Try to guide me,
Always start by dividing
And multiplying me –
From what they consider
Wrong or right?
I thought,
There were no walls
For whoever beams truth and light.
And how can one speak on Light's behalf,
lf all they do
Is act black,
But talk WHITE?
- Suzy Kassem
Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Step out of my sunlight.
- Diogenes Laertius
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.
- David Gerrold
The Man Who Folded Himself
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...
50
51
52
53
54
 		...