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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:

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Voltaire Candide (1759)

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

Emil Cioran On the Heights of Despair (1934)

I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

Eugène Ionesco

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Ernest Gellner Words and Things (1959)

Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.

Peter Wessel Zapffe The Humorous Pessimist (1990)

The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

James Thomson The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a ‘philosopher’ simply do not have a day job to go to.

Kevin Warwick

Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

If philosophy among other vagaries were also to have the notion that it could occur to a man to act in accordance with its teaching, one might make out of that a queer comedy.

Søren Kierkegaard

To grasp the limits of reason – only this is truly philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars.

Bertrand Russell

Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the goldern gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

Lewis Carroll Sylvie and Bruno (1889)

Sin is this: before God, or with the conception of God, to be in despair at not willing to be oneself, or in despair at willing to be oneself.

Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

Unfortunately for mankind—and perhaps fortunately for tyrants—the poor and downtrodden lack the instinct or pride of the elephant, who refuses to breed in captivity.

Nicolas Chamfort

Only someone who loves children the most can see them beyond the tip of their own nose and wonder about the consequences of signing death sentences on not yet existing beings.

Michel Onfray

Because I do not want to commit the crime of giving life to beings who later may be unhappy and curse the moment of their birth.

Gabriela Zapolska

What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.

Richard Dawkins

The systematic perversion and reinterpretation of the values themselves is much more effective than the “slandering” of persons or the falsification of the world view could ever be.

Max Scheler

A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean.

Zhuangzi

Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.

Charles Darwin Origin of Species (1859)

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