Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Philosopher Quotes from famous authors such as Morten Tyldum, Malcolm de Chazal, Howard Jacobson, Edward Gibbon, Aulus Gellius. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.
2
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
3
To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.
4
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
5
I see the beard and cloak, but I don’t yet see a philosopher.
6
Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.
7
If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
8
I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a simple boy from East Ham.
9
The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.
10
I want to read philosophers.
11
I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.
12
I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.
13
I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
14
All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers.
15
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
16
A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages… in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.
17
Jesus Christ is infinitely more than a great teacher and philosopher.
18
Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.
19
I worked among many famous philosophers, and I tried to observe how they treated students. I knew which ones I wanted to be like, and which ones I didn’t.
20
I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
21
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
22
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
23
Simon Critchley’s ‘The Book of Dead Philosophers’ – it’s a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.
24
It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.
25
Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.
26
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
27
Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human – which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race’s distinguishing characteristics – children must be surrounded by animal imagery.
28
A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions.
29
Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.
30
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher.
31
Nature’s God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
32
Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
33
A philosopher once said, ‘Half of good philosophy is good grammar.’
34
A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.
35
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
36
God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
37
Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics – it’s not talking about things that have affected computer science; it’s mathematical logic.
38
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it’s a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
39
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.
40
We’re in a post-conceptual era where it’s really the artist’s idea and vision that are prized rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today, our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.
41
Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?
42
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
43
When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.
44
There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.
45
As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is – so that he neither seek it nor flee it.
46
The figure of Satan and the fires of hell have been demythologized by modern Christian biblical scholars, theologians and philosophers.
47
Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.
48
The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.
49
We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
50
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
51
I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.
52
Back in 2000, I had come to a crossroads in my life, unsure about what career path I should pursue. Shepherd, bouncer, philosopher king, ventriloquist or perhaps man on the flying trapeze. Fortunately, I was guided back onto the path of the magical world of music.
53
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
54
I’m not an academic philosopher, and don’t agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I’m a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I’m as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.
55
A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he’s just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to… it’s the best way to testify, to be a witness.
56
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
57
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
58
Einstein’s results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.
59
Teenagers are philosophers. They are thinking about the big things like existence and identity at a time when their identities are changing so fast.
60
A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
61
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
62
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.
63
Climbing has so much more culture than all other activities put together. There is no culture in tennis, just a few names, a few dates. No big culture in soccer. But we have thousands of books, great philosophers, thinkers, painters.
64
I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of ‘opposing truths at extremes’ is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.
65
I’m not a minister, I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a politician, I’m in another category.
66
I’m not like a preacher or philosopher, but at the end of the day, life is about happiness.
67
Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, ‘Middlesex.’
68
The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke’s philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
69
Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
70
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
71
When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
72
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
73
It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.
74
For conclusion, I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught.
75
All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
76
Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
77
The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That’s part of their trouble.
78
The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher’s Stone.
79
The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time – of one thing preceding another – the effort to establish causality is a mug’s game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.
80
The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant.
81
I like Jacques Derrida; I think he’s funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he’s not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?
82
Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.
83
It’s always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.
84
I’m extremely close to my mother. She’s always meant a lot to me and has held the place of friend, philosopher and guide in my life.
85
The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again. Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of Right and Left.
86
Summertime, and the reading is easy… Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.
87
Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
88
For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.
89
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
90
It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.
91
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’
92
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
93
Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.
94
A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.
95
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
96
Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.
97
The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations – Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others – were natives of Europe and America.
98
Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
99
That was sort of the ‘Second City’ approach, which was try to be intelligent and assume your audience is intelligent. We were influenced by ‘Monty Python,’ too, which would have philosophers in a wrestling match.
100
There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.
101
The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.
102
For they, the philosophers, were considered teachers of right living, which is far more excellent, since to speak well belongs only to a few, but to live well belongs to all.
103
I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.
104
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
105
I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author. It’s only me.
106
The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.
107
Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
108
There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an ‘intellectual.’ When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn’t afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
109
You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?
110
If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this earth.
111
I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
112
Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is – in a distinctive way – a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price’s philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure.
113
The ancient Greek philosophers were blonde and blue-eyed and, even then, talked about how their race was mixed with others and how this affected their society negatively. When there were no more natural blondes and no more blue eyes in Greece, they incidentally stopped producing great philosophers.
114
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
115
It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
116
There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
117
Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in ‘worlds’ just like our own.
118
A vendor selling coconuts on the road is a philosopher. He will have ideas on politics, economics, history, sports. This has saved India. The fact that the common Indian is a thinker is vital.
119
Brazil is a country largely resistant to ideology. This is a strange fact given its founding by followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who inscribed an epigram from his philosophy of positivism in the national flag: Order and Progress.
120
A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.
121
We are political animals, as, not without reason, affirmed Aristotle, who perhaps influenced humanity’s thinking more than any other ancient philosopher through his almost 200 treatises, according to reports, of which only 31 have been preserved.
122
A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
123
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
124
I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I’m really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.
125
No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.
126
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
127
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the ‘Zhuangzi’ is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
128
It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
129
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
130
What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?
131
My profession is I’m a dissident philosopher.
132
Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers – not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians – have sought answers in their subject’s childhood.
133
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
134
Of all the named structures within the abdomen and the chest, those associated with reproduction retained the mysteries of their willful behavior long after others had been solved to the satisfaction of physicians and philosophers.
135
The hero of the ‘Peanuts’ is Charlie Brown. I play the dog that sleeps on the top of his dog box who’s a philosopher. I’m drawn to that. So I’m drawn to Barbossa as I’m drawn to Einstein, because they are outsiders, and I suppose, as a character actor, that’s the turf that you’re locked into, in a way.
136
Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
137
Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?
138
The method of exposition which philosophers have adopted leads many to suppose that they are simply inquiries, that they have no interest in the conclusions at which they arrive, and that their primary concern is to follow their premises to their logical conclusions.
139
I’m not the world’s best philosopher. But I am one of the world’s best strategists. I will put my strategic abilities against anybody on Earth.
140
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
141
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
142
Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.
143
For centuries many of the world’s distinguished philosophers have assaulted Christianity as being irrational, superstitious and absurd.
144
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
145
I’ve found a very good friend and a philosopher in Trivikram.
146
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
147
The man of science is a poor philosopher.
148
I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that’s the direction.
149
The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.
150
What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.
151
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.
152
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.
153
I am not a philosopher, only frustrated by the development of the world we live in – and too stupid to keep my mouth shut when I see injustice.
154
I grew up in a household that really encouraged reading and writing. My mother loves philosophy and is constantly reading philosophy and talking to me about different philosophers and different ways of life.
155
It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.
