Skip to content

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:

This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

Francis Bacon The Advancement of Learning (1605)

General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties.

Ervin László Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972)

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principal motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

Simone Weil Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)

According to the academic world view that markets are efficient, only the revelation of a dramatic piece of information can cause a crash, yet in reality even the most thorough post-mortem analyses are typically inconclusive as to what this piece of information might have been. For traders and investors, the fear of a crash is a perpetual source of stress, and the onset of the event itself always ruins the lives of some of them.

Didier Sornette Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003)

The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things.

David Benatar Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006)

Not only does having a child really increase your carbon footprint, but we are living on an earth where there are a lot of organisms — human, non-human — that are in desperate need of care. And so, for me, if people want to care for children, for animals, whatever, there are cries for care everywhere. I’m asking us to reflect on this idea that we need to reproduce.

Patricia MacCormack

Life has so few charms!
And yet we desire it.
No more pleasure, no more power,
in the horrors of death.
A dead lion is not worth
a midge that breathes.
O unfortunate mortal!
Whether your soul is enjoying
the moment given to you,
or whether death is ending it,
both are torture.
It is better not to have been born.

Voltaire

Lear: I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban.
What is your study?
Edgar: How to prevent the fiend, and to kill vermin.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1603)

The existentialist says the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

Eugène Ionesco

To procreate is to love the scourge – to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours: annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is somber, it is infernal by essence.

Emil Cioran

I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Anton Chekhov

How could it have harmed us never to have been created? Are we to believe that our life lay groveling in murk and misery until the first day of creation dawned for us? All people, once born, must certainly wish to remain in life, so long as seductive pleasure detains them; but if one has never tasted the love of life or been numbered among the living, how does it harm one not to have been created?

Lucretius

The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve — the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end.

Fernando Pessoa

The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, “to kill time,” in other words, to escape from boredom.

Arthur Schopenhauer

What loss were ours, if we had know not birth?
Let living me to longer life aspire,
While fond affection binds their hearts to earth
But who never hath tasted life's desire,
Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth.

Lucretius

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim — like that of science — was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.

Colin Wilson Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)

Whereas the particular conception of ideology designates only a part of the opponent's assertions as ideologies — and this only with reference to their content, the total conception calls into question the opponent's total Weltanschauung (including his conceptual apparatus), and attempts to understand these concepts as an outgrowth of the collective life of which he partakes.

Karl Mannheim Ideology and Utopia (1929)

You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

Jesus

The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. ... Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.

Theodor Adorno Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965)

Related topics