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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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Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.
- Sally Rooney
Normal People
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Actually it is quite devastating to realise how few people ever think at all. They mostly take their ideas from what they are told on the wireless, television, or in the newspapers, from people who are prepared to take a reasonable fee. To suggest anything different makes you tread on many corns of vested interest. No professional pathfinder likes you for doing it.
- Thomas Charles Lethbridge
The Power of the Pendulum
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One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.
- David Benatar
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
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Philosophy is a hallow bone with no flesh on it
- Montaigne
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The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.
- José Ortega y Gasset
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You will never know how high you can climb until you reach the top.
- K.L. Toth
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The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
- D.H. Lawrence
Selected Essays
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Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
- Terry Eagleton
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#quote In the harshest conditions is when we know better the people around us. En las condiciones más duras es cuando conocemos mejor a las personas que nos rodean.
- Juan Luis Ortiz Hidalgo
Las mil vidas del profesor Bonham
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The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.
- Aysha Taryam
The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
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Il pessimismo radicale sconfina nell'ottimismo.
- Guido Morselli
Dissipatio H.G.
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Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.
- Gary Cox
How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses
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Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
- Hegel, G. W. H.
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But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.
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If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
- Elizabeth Bear
Range of Ghosts
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There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
- Bones The Doctor in the Photo
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Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficial
to the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
- Baron d'Holbach
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The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.
- Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
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They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
- Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars
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…it can hardly be over-exaggerated that speculative thinking is always drawn from the necessities of the time, that it is always practical, that it always shifts with the interests of the times, with the changes of social, economic, and political conditions, and finally, that it is vain to hope to find an eternal, fixed, and immutable system of philosophy, and still hope for progress. A fixed system is applicable only to a dead society.
- Holly Estil Cunningham
An Introduction to Philosophy
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we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.
- Ilyas Kassam
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although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
- Rene Decartes
Discourse on Method
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For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.
- Walter Scott
Kenilworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.
- Sally Rooney
Normal People
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Actually it is quite devastating to realise how few people ever think at all. They mostly take their ideas from what they are told on the wireless, television, or in the newspapers, from people who are prepared to take a reasonable fee. To suggest anything different makes you tread on many corns of vested interest. No professional pathfinder likes you for doing it.
- Thomas Charles Lethbridge
The Power of the Pendulum
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.
- David Benatar
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy is a hallow bone with no flesh on it
- Montaigne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.
- José Ortega y Gasset
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You will never know how high you can climb until you reach the top.
- K.L. Toth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
- D.H. Lawrence
Selected Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
- Terry Eagleton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
#quote In the harshest conditions is when we know better the people around us. En las condiciones más duras es cuando conocemos mejor a las personas que nos rodean.
- Juan Luis Ortiz Hidalgo
Las mil vidas del profesor Bonham
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.
- Aysha Taryam
The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Il pessimismo radicale sconfina nell'ottimismo.
- Guido Morselli
Dissipatio H.G.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.
- Gary Cox
How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
- Hegel, G. W. H.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
- Elizabeth Bear
Range of Ghosts
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
- Bones The Doctor in the Photo
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficial
to the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
- Baron d'Holbach
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.
- Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
- Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…it can hardly be over-exaggerated that speculative thinking is always drawn from the necessities of the time, that it is always practical, that it always shifts with the interests of the times, with the changes of social, economic, and political conditions, and finally, that it is vain to hope to find an eternal, fixed, and immutable system of philosophy, and still hope for progress. A fixed system is applicable only to a dead society.
- Holly Estil Cunningham
An Introduction to Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.
- Ilyas Kassam
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
- Rene Decartes
Discourse on Method
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.
- Walter Scott
Kenilworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.
- Sally Rooney
Normal People
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Actually it is quite devastating to realise how few people ever think at all. They mostly take their ideas from what they are told on the wireless, television, or in the newspapers, from people who are prepared to take a reasonable fee. To suggest anything different makes you tread on many corns of vested interest. No professional pathfinder likes you for doing it.
- Thomas Charles Lethbridge
The Power of the Pendulum
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.
- David Benatar
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Philosophy is a hallow bone with no flesh on it
- Montaigne
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.
- José Ortega y Gasset
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You will never know how high you can climb until you reach the top.
- K.L. Toth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
- D.H. Lawrence
Selected Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
- Terry Eagleton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
#quote In the harshest conditions is when we know better the people around us. En las condiciones más duras es cuando conocemos mejor a las personas que nos rodean.
- Juan Luis Ortiz Hidalgo
Las mil vidas del profesor Bonham
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.
- Aysha Taryam
The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Il pessimismo radicale sconfina nell'ottimismo.
- Guido Morselli
Dissipatio H.G.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.
- Gary Cox
How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
- Hegel, G. W. H.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above?
- Elizabeth Bear
Range of Ghosts
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
- Bones The Doctor in the Photo
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficial
to the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
- Baron d'Holbach
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.
- Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
- Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
…it can hardly be over-exaggerated that speculative thinking is always drawn from the necessities of the time, that it is always practical, that it always shifts with the interests of the times, with the changes of social, economic, and political conditions, and finally, that it is vain to hope to find an eternal, fixed, and immutable system of philosophy, and still hope for progress. A fixed system is applicable only to a dead society.
- Holly Estil Cunningham
An Introduction to Philosophy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.
- Ilyas Kassam
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
- Rene Decartes
Discourse on Method
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.
- Walter Scott
Kenilworth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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93
94
95
96
97
 		...