Philosophy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Charles M. Schulz

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

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

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.

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

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

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."

'What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth — or in heaven — do I mean by "integral"? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: "comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness." Short definition, tall order.

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

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords — philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Cubism is not a formula, it is not a school. Cubism is a philosophy, a point of view in the universe. It is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

Jacques Lipchitz

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today's isms have become yesterday's ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity.

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

Thomas Robert Malthus

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

Chauncey Wright

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e. g., abut space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics). It has taught us new methods of thinking (complimentarity), which are applicable far beyond physics.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

William Winwood Reade

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

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

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