Philosopher Quotes

"To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
-Socrates

"I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another."
-Rene Descartes

"God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country.'"
-Benjamin Franklin

"Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other."
-George Eliot

"There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it."
-Cicero

"Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance."
-Bertrand Russell

"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."
-H. L. Mencken

"The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers."
-Denis Diderot

"Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not."
-Stephen Vizinczey

"PREFERENCE, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another. An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. 'Because,' he replied, 'death is no better than life.' It is longer."
-Ambrose Bierce

"A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place."
-Fontenelle

"I am not a philosopher who is trying to make a system of thought. I am a mystic who is trying to convey the mysteries that have become available to me. I will confuse you. ."
-Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

"There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers."
-William James

"What is most important is growing sustainable cultures, not building sustainable developments or green buildings. We should be thinking in terms of serving our human community first, ... a philosopher and builder."
-John Knott

"Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease."
-Anthony Daniels

"A philosopher who adopts scientific notions predetermines his conclusions."
-Nicolas Gomez Davila

"Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on Jews and Gypsies at Auschwitz (he had two doctorates, by the way) would have fit in quite nicely at Columbia, ... To paraphrase Theodor Adorno, the German Jewish philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, 'Auschwitz begins wherever somebody looks at a Columbia lab and thinks: they're only animals.'"
-Charles Patterson

"During the last months of the German Occupation in 1944, the young man who was to become France's most controversial contemporary philosopher and the woman who was to become its most controversial feminist met the professional criminal who was to become its most controversial playwright."
-Otto Friedrich

"It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity."
-Ariel Durant

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."
-Ambrose Bierce

"Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man."
-David Hume

"EPICURE, n. An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification from the senses."
-Ambrose Bierce

"I maintain that today many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology."
-Oswald Spengler

"He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher."
-Edward G. Bulwer lytton

"Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution."
-Robert Zend

"I see the beard and cloak, but I don't yet see a philosopher."
-Aulus Gellius