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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:

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.

Dan Simmons The Fall of Hyperion (1990)

I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

To introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.

Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.

Samuel R. Delany Triton (1976)

The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.

Simon Blackburn Think (1999)

Psychiatry's chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul.

Alexander Chase Rhoda Thomas Tripp (1970)

Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known.

Anthony Kenny What I Believe (2006)

Self-taught poverty is a help toward philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice.

Diogenes of Sinope

Induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy.

C. D. Broad

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

Richard Courant What is Mathematics? (1941)

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Personal Recollections (1981)

Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middle-aged philosophers.

Algis Budrys Some Will Not Die (1961)

Growth as a goal, to repeat, is delusion. William James, the American philosopher, talked of the "bitch goddess success." A philosopher of business today might well talk of the "bitch goddess growth."

Peter Drucker MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)

Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study — which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.

Samuel R. Delany The Mad Man (1994)

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

Isaiah Berlin The Listener (1978)

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

Leszek Kołakowski Metaphysical Horror (1988)

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

Timothy Leary The Best Advice Ever for Teachers (2001)

Even today — in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman than most New Deal economists.

Robert Heilbroner The Worldly Philosophers (1953)

The link between philosophy and theatre is strong because theatre also deals with the embodiment of cognitive action, that is, making something happen as a sign of something else.

Florinda Cambria

When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.

Kahlil Gibran Sand and Foam (1926)

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