Philosophy Quotes

"The power of philosophy floats through my head, light like a feather, heavy as lead."
-Bob Marley

"The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy - and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational - the powers of reason are s."
-Steve Allen

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

"There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker."
-Charles M. Schulz

"All philosophies, if you ride them, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others."
-Samuel Butler

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."
-Baruch Spinoza

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

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
-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

"Psychiatry's chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul."
-Alexander Chase

"Leisure is the mother of philosophy."
-Thomas Hobbes

"The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom."
-Paramahansa Yogananda

"Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one."
-Nikolai Berdyaev

"Most mothers are instinctive philosophers."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe

"This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities."
-Bertrand Russell

"There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more."
-Robert Nozick

"Whoever makes something having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process (transferring some of his holdings for these cooperating factors), is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them."
-Robert Nozick

"My only wish is…to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons."
-Ludwig Feuerbach

"The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered."
-Felix Adler

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

"I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively."
-Angela Davis

"From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen."
-Robert Nozick

"Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius."
-Albert Pike

"We have limited knowledge, or else science and philosophy would not be necessary."
-Ivan Urlaub

"Just as philosophy is the study of other people's misconceptions, so history is the study of other people's mistakes."
-Phillip Guedala

"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."
-Henry David Thoreau

"And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?"
-Plato

"Philosophy is the highest music."
-Plato