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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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Nothing' isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... nothing." Arya Stark
- George R. R. Martin
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Bloom as if you want to make the whole world beautiful.
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As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.
- John Gray
Perros de paja: Reflexiones sobre los humanos y otros animales
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In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.
- George Lakoff
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Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
- David Starr Jordan
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Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
- Sun Tzu
The Art of War
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I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.
- Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
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Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Essays and Aphorisms
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I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?
- E.A. Bucchianeri
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
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When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written; then the standard of the just or the unjust, which is to be the norm of conduct for the ignorant as well as for the philosophic citizen, is not a matter of controversy but of fact; then only are citizens not subject to the petty tyrannies of the many which are the more cruel as the distance between the oppressed and the oppressor is less, and which are far more fatal than those of a single man, for the despotism of many can only be corrected by the despotism of one; the cruelty of a single despot is proportioned, not to his might, but to the obstacles he encounters.
- Cesare Beccaria
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings
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To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes be content with less?
- Henry David Thoreau
Walden or, Life in the Woods
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Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
- Lucretius
On the Nature of Things
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No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools.

Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.
- H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
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in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
- Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
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I need just be a bayonet, a bayonet named Diving Punishment. I wish I'd been born a storm. Or a menace. Or a single grenade. No heart, no tears, just as a terrible gale'd have been good. If [by doing this] I become that, then so be it.
- Kouta Hirano
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Man is the measure of all things', said the Sophist Protagora (c. 485-410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person's needs.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
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If your treated like a puppet find a new ball of string
- Benny Bellamacina
Piddly Poems for Children: Volume 1
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Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
- R. Scott Bakker
The White Luck Warrior
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Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?
- Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas
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But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The Age of Reason
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Tudo é permitido e válido em nome do monopólio universal da distinção entre o verdadeiro e o falso. Everything is permitted and valid in the name of universal monopoly of the distinction between true and false.
- Victor Eustáquio
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Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
- Osman Bakar
Tawhid and Science
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[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth."

"No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it."

"And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?"

Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.
- Iain Pears
The Dream of Scipio
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Nothing' isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... nothing." Arya Stark
- George R. R. Martin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Bloom as if you want to make the whole world beautiful.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.
- John Gray
Perros de paja: Reflexiones sobre los humanos y otros animales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.
- George Lakoff
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
- David Starr Jordan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
- Sun Tzu
The Art of War
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.
- Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Essays and Aphorisms
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?
- E.A. Bucchianeri
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written; then the standard of the just or the unjust, which is to be the norm of conduct for the ignorant as well as for the philosophic citizen, is not a matter of controversy but of fact; then only are citizens not subject to the petty tyrannies of the many which are the more cruel as the distance between the oppressed and the oppressor is less, and which are far more fatal than those of a single man, for the despotism of many can only be corrected by the despotism of one; the cruelty of a single despot is proportioned, not to his might, but to the obstacles he encounters.
- Cesare Beccaria
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes be content with less?
- Henry David Thoreau
Walden or, Life in the Woods
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
- Lucretius
On the Nature of Things
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools.

Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.
- H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
- Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I need just be a bayonet, a bayonet named Diving Punishment. I wish I'd been born a storm. Or a menace. Or a single grenade. No heart, no tears, just as a terrible gale'd have been good. If [by doing this] I become that, then so be it.
- Kouta Hirano
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is the measure of all things', said the Sophist Protagora (c. 485-410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person's needs.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If your treated like a puppet find a new ball of string
- Benny Bellamacina
Piddly Poems for Children: Volume 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
- R. Scott Bakker
The White Luck Warrior
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?
- Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The Age of Reason
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Tudo é permitido e válido em nome do monopólio universal da distinção entre o verdadeiro e o falso. Everything is permitted and valid in the name of universal monopoly of the distinction between true and false.
- Victor Eustáquio
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
- Osman Bakar
Tawhid and Science
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth."

"No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it."

"And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?"

Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.
- Iain Pears
The Dream of Scipio
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nothing' isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... nothing." Arya Stark
- George R. R. Martin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Bloom as if you want to make the whole world beautiful.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.
- John Gray
Perros de paja: Reflexiones sobre los humanos y otros animales
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.
- George Lakoff
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
- David Starr Jordan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
- Sun Tzu
The Art of War
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.
- Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
Galloping with Light - Einstein, Relativity, and Folklore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Essays and Aphorisms
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?
- E.A. Bucchianeri
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written; then the standard of the just or the unjust, which is to be the norm of conduct for the ignorant as well as for the philosophic citizen, is not a matter of controversy but of fact; then only are citizens not subject to the petty tyrannies of the many which are the more cruel as the distance between the oppressed and the oppressor is less, and which are far more fatal than those of a single man, for the despotism of many can only be corrected by the despotism of one; the cruelty of a single despot is proportioned, not to his might, but to the obstacles he encounters.
- Cesare Beccaria
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes be content with less?
- Henry David Thoreau
Walden or, Life in the Woods
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
- Lucretius
On the Nature of Things
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools.

Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.
- H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
- Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I need just be a bayonet, a bayonet named Diving Punishment. I wish I'd been born a storm. Or a menace. Or a single grenade. No heart, no tears, just as a terrible gale'd have been good. If [by doing this] I become that, then so be it.
- Kouta Hirano
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is the measure of all things', said the Sophist Protagora (c. 485-410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person's needs.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If your treated like a puppet find a new ball of string
- Benny Bellamacina
Piddly Poems for Children: Volume 1
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
- R. Scott Bakker
The White Luck Warrior
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?
- Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The Age of Reason
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Tudo é permitido e válido em nome do monopólio universal da distinção entre o verdadeiro e o falso. Everything is permitted and valid in the name of universal monopoly of the distinction between true and false.
- Victor Eustáquio
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
- Osman Bakar
Tawhid and Science
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth."

"No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it."

"And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?"

Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.
- Iain Pears
The Dream of Scipio
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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69
70
71
72
73
 		...