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Philosophy Quotes

Emil Cioran has the most entries on this page, ahead of Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Kierkegaard and Camus. If you want a sourced place to begin, Russell’s Theory of Knowledge (1913) has the remark that people beginning to philosophize seem to think they must make themselves artificially stupid.

Three entries are flagged. The sentence that the sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language is credited to Wittgenstein as disputed; the version on the page comes from a later writer complaining about it. The passage on heroic love in the name of Giordano Bruno is also disputed, and the notes give an Italian original from Francesco De Sanctis’s history of literature (1871). The one about shabby ideas and shoddy furniture is credited to Einstein and flagged misattributed.

Random quote on Philosophy

Most quoted on philosophy:

The Beginning of Philosophy is a Consciousness of your own Weakness and inability in necessary things.

Epictetus

Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us -- but not suckle us.

Søren Kierkegaard

Philosophy is an interpretation of the world in order to change it.

Karl Marx

That stone,
Philosophers in vain so long have sought.

John Milton

Philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge.

Plato

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

Emil Cioran

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Emil Cioran

A man is born in sin, he enters this world by means of a crime, his existence is a crime – and procreation is the fall.

Søren Kierkegaard

A rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Salman Rushdie Address at Columbia University (1991)

That is exactly the point, what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time.

Rabindranath Tagore

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

George Orwell

philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles; truth, however, can only be one.

Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio (1998)

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars.

Bertrand Russell Unpopular Essays (1950)

That is what Christianity is for – which straightaway bars the way to procreation. This means: stop!

Søren Kierkegaard

All conditions and all circumstances seem equally unfortunate to me, from the angel to the oyster. The grievous thing is to be born.

Madame du Deffand

Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

I am human, and I make mistakes. Therefore my commitment must be to truth and not to consistency.

Mahatma Gandhi

Part of me is drawn to the nature of sadness because I think life is sad, and sadness is not something that should be avoided or denied. It's a fact of life, like contradictions are.

Robert Redford

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

George Bernard Shaw

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