Philosophy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Bertrand Russell

Ludwig van Beethoven

C. S. Lewis

Elie Wiesel

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

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Thornton Wilder

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

Bertrand Russell

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as "mankind's need for metaphysics."

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.

I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there actually are in heaven and earth.

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Joseph de Maistre

I have a new philosophy; I'm only going to dread one day at a time.

Charles M. Schulz

The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

The philosophy of Black Consciousness therefore expresses group pride and the determination of the black to rise and attain the envisaged self.... At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realization by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

We all more or less consciously note this. We cannot help observing that all serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.