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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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Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
- Rene Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
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If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
- Hillel the Elder
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The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
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Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
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The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
- Joel Salatin
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
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To achieve great things we must be self-confined...mastery is revealed in limitation.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
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You can't just skip the boring parts."
"Of course I can skip the boring parts."
"How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"
"I can tell."
"Then you can't say you've read the whole play."
"I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
- Gary D. Schmidt
The Wednesday Wars
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You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
- Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
- Daniel Quinn
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The willing are led by fate, the reluctant are dragged.
- Cleanthes of Assos
Hymn to Zeus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
- Douglas Coupland
The Gum Thief
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Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
- Agatha Christie
The Moving Finger
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In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
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The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
- John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism
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For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
- Jasper Fforde
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
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Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.
- Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
- Confucius
The Wisdom of Confucius
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The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade
- John Keats
Lamia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.
- Edmund Husserl
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life makes you pay...everybody pays something
- Min Jin Lee
Pachinko
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
- Rene Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
- Hillel the Elder
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
- Joel Salatin
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To achieve great things we must be self-confined...mastery is revealed in limitation.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You can't just skip the boring parts."
"Of course I can skip the boring parts."
"How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"
"I can tell."
"Then you can't say you've read the whole play."
"I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
- Gary D. Schmidt
The Wednesday Wars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
- Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
- Daniel Quinn
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The willing are led by fate, the reluctant are dragged.
- Cleanthes of Assos
Hymn to Zeus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
- Douglas Coupland
The Gum Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
- Agatha Christie
The Moving Finger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
- John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
- Jasper Fforde
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.
- Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
- Confucius
The Wisdom of Confucius
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade
- John Keats
Lamia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.
- Edmund Husserl
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life makes you pay...everybody pays something
- Min Jin Lee
Pachinko
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
- Rene Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
- Hillel the Elder
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.
- Dejan Stojanovic
The Sun Watches the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
- Joel Salatin
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To achieve great things we must be self-confined...mastery is revealed in limitation.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You can't just skip the boring parts."
"Of course I can skip the boring parts."
"How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"
"I can tell."
"Then you can't say you've read the whole play."
"I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
- Gary D. Schmidt
The Wednesday Wars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
- Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
- Daniel Quinn
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The willing are led by fate, the reluctant are dragged.
- Cleanthes of Assos
Hymn to Zeus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
- Douglas Coupland
The Gum Thief
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
- Agatha Christie
The Moving Finger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
- John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
- Jasper Fforde
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.
- Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
- Confucius
The Wisdom of Confucius
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade
- John Keats
Lamia
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.
- Edmund Husserl
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life makes you pay...everybody pays something
- Min Jin Lee
Pachinko
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
- Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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63
64
65
66
67
 		...