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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 so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
- Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
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A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
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I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism and Human Emotions
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Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
- Raymond Chandler
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Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
- W.V. Quine
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Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?
- Gene Rodenberry
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Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's Philosophical Exploration of Art and Tragedy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.
- Shah Asad Rizvi
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The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
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Man, you see, swings between nihilism and spirituality. Man, you see, swings between utmost bliss and the feelings of utter despair. It’s a rollercoaster, our lives. One can’t just go higher, higher all the time.
- Abhaidev
The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.
- Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life itself is only a vision, a dream."
"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!
- Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.
- Nick Land
Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007
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Love isn't always a physical emotion. Sometimes it's the ones who never got to actually hold you in their arms that appreciate you for who you are
- Sarah Sprague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
- Robert M. Sapolsky
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources; only success can tell one from the other.
- Ernst Mach
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Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
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Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
- Plato
Phaedrus
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let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
- Plato
Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'

It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
- Robin McKinley
Spindle's End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.
- Noah Levine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
- Scott Hahn
Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
- Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism and Human Emotions
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
- Raymond Chandler
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
- W.V. Quine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?
- Gene Rodenberry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's Philosophical Exploration of Art and Tragedy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.
- Shah Asad Rizvi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man, you see, swings between nihilism and spirituality. Man, you see, swings between utmost bliss and the feelings of utter despair. It’s a rollercoaster, our lives. One can’t just go higher, higher all the time.
- Abhaidev
The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.
- Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life itself is only a vision, a dream."
"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!
- Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.
- Nick Land
Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love isn't always a physical emotion. Sometimes it's the ones who never got to actually hold you in their arms that appreciate you for who you are
- Sarah Sprague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
- Robert M. Sapolsky
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources; only success can tell one from the other.
- Ernst Mach
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
- Plato
Phaedrus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
- Plato
Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'

It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
- Robin McKinley
Spindle's End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.
- Noah Levine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
- Scott Hahn
Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
- Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
- Jostein Gaarder
Sophie’s World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism and Human Emotions
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
- Raymond Chandler
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
- W.V. Quine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?
- Gene Rodenberry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's Philosophical Exploration of Art and Tragedy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.
- Shah Asad Rizvi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Man, you see, swings between nihilism and spirituality. Man, you see, swings between utmost bliss and the feelings of utter despair. It’s a rollercoaster, our lives. One can’t just go higher, higher all the time.
- Abhaidev
The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.
- Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Life itself is only a vision, a dream."
"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!
- Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.
- Nick Land
Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love isn't always a physical emotion. Sometimes it's the ones who never got to actually hold you in their arms that appreciate you for who you are
- Sarah Sprague
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
- Robert M. Sapolsky
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources; only success can tell one from the other.
- Ernst Mach
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
- Plato
Phaedrus
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
- Plato
Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Oh, why does compassion weaken us?'

It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
- Robin McKinley
Spindle's End
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.
- Noah Levine
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.
- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
- Scott Hahn
Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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76
77
78
79
80
 		...