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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 reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Winston Churchill

Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.

Vladimir Lenin

He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things. He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person). But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.

Hesiod

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Flower in the Crannied Wall (1869)

I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off.

Rita Mae Brown Starting from Scratch (1989)

Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.

Donald Phillip Verene Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997)

Every culture has a shared pattern of thinking. It is the cement that holds a culture together, gives it unity. A culture's characteristic way of thinking is imbedded in its concept of the nature of reality, its world view.

Russell L. Ackoff Re-Creating the Corporation (1999)

Now I dare to pursue wisdom itself and to be myself a philosopher; formerly I worshipped the philosophers.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Albert Camus The Fall (1956)

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.

Tom Stoppard

Two things are unacceptable: birth and death. I did not ask for them and I do not accept them.

Eugène Ionesco

Do you want to know how it is not a great benefit to give life like this? You could have exposed me; clearly it was an injustice to have begat me!

Seneca the Younger

But when I describe something and you describe another thing, or I say something and you say nothing - Is there any contradiction? How can he who speaks contradict him who speaks not.

Plato

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.

Albert Einstein Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)

Philosophy is nothing but discretion.

John Selden Table Talk (1689)

Whoever shall find the interpretation of these words shall not taste of death. (1)

Jesus

Systems philosophy brings forth a reorganization of ways of thinking. It creates a new worldview, a new paradigm of perception and explanation, which is manifested in integration, holistic thinking, purpose-seeking, mutual causality, and process-focused inquiry.

Béla H. Bánáthy Systems Design of Education (1991)

Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sorts of question.

Nigel Warburton Philosophy: The Basics (2013)

Philosophy, like charity, begins at home ; but also, like charity, I should wish it to extend, and become the more beneficial the more it expands.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

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 The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

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