Great philosophy quotes | The World of English

Great philosophy quotes, more than one hundred famous aphorisms of the most important philosophers and thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Einstein, chosen for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger.

One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.
Friedrich von Schlegel

A philosophy that upsets no one and angers no one is not a philosophy. It serves to harm stupidity, it makes stupidity something shameful. It has no other use than this: to denounce the baseness of thought in all its forms.
Gilles Deleuze

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Without “ethical culture”, there is no salvation for humanity.
Albert Einstein

The only true “philosophy” is that of the hermit who wants nothing to do with the world.
Emil Cioran

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Bertrand Russell

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
Epictetus

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.
Karl Popper

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you don’t like my principles, I ‘ve got others.
Groucho Marx

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
Rene Descartes

Mark Twain argued that humor is born of pain, that’s why the true philosopher can only be a humorist.
Carl William Brown

To be is to be perceived. (Esse est percipi).
Bishop George Berkeley

The aim of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the bottle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion is the history of the power of God and his followers, science is the history of the power of knowledge, the world is the history of the power of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The important thing is to not stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

Virtue is nothing else than right reason.
Seneca the Younger

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing mistakenly attributed to.
Edmund Burke

Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man’s?
Friedrich Nietzsche

The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.
Socrates

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feeling?
Diogenes

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James

Universe doesn’t even know that you exist, so relax!
Carl William Brown

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius

If I followed the moltitude, I should not have studied philosophy.
Chrysippus of Soli

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell

Happiness is the highest good.
Aristotle

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
Carl Jung

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
Bertrand Russell

If Dante in the thirteenth century even put some Popes into hell, in 2000 Carl William Brown can easily put some philosophers in the bog.
Carl William Brown

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the currents of life, is without trouble.
Carl Jung

The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.
Epicurus

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable.
G. W. F. Hegel

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never hidden this belief of mine, on the contrary I have expressed it clearly. If there is anything in me that can be defined as a religious feeling, it is precisely that boundless admiration for the structure of the world within the limits in which science can reveal it to us.
Albert Einstein

Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
John Dewey

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
Plato

Man is condemned to be free.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature.
Spinoza

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes

In everything, there is a share of everything.
Anaxagoras

The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
Democritus

To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.
John Stuart Mill

That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless.
Plato

Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative.
Aristotle

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one’s desires, but by the removal of desire.
Epictetus

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
Sir Francis Bacon

Hang up philosophy, unless philosophy can make a Juliet.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Plato

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
Diogenes

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
David Hume

The reasonable man adapts to the world. The unreasonable man insists on trying to adapt the world to himself. So all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
W. K. Clifford

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.
Srinivasa Ramanujan

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
René Descartes

Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein

No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
John Locke

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
William James

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
Baruch Spinoza

Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.
Epicurus

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
William of Ockham

Science has the role of improving the real, but literature has the task of perfecting the ideal.
Carl William Brown

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Albert Einstein

We live in the best of all possible worlds.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Friedrich Nietzsche

One cannot step twice in the same river.
Heraclitus

I have fought, it is a lot; I believed in my victory … It is already something to have come this far … Not to have feared of dying … to have preferred a courageous death to a cowardly life.
Giordano Bruno

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
Galileo Galilei

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Jules de Gaultier

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolo Machiavelli

It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we CAN imagine.
J.B.S. Haldane

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg

I think therefore I am. (Cogito, ergo sum).
René Descartes

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Søren Kierkegaard

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
Clarence Darrow

We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
St. Augustine

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Voltaire (in parody of Leibniz)

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Socrates

Man is the measure of all things.
Protagoras

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
Immanuel Kant

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
Thomas Hobbes

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know.
Bertrand Russell

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Mathematica is the alphabet in which God wrote the Universe.
Galileo Galilei

The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes

The pact between religion, science and stupidity is nothing more than an agreement to allow authority to better exercise its power.
Carl William Brown

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature.
John Locke

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Man in his arrogance believes himself to be a great work, worthy of a divine creation. More humbly, I think it is more correct to consider him descended from animals.
Charles Robert Darwin

Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.
Søren Kierkegaard

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
Voltaire

Science is the source of values that are in communion, not in antithesis with the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, therefore with the values of the Revealed Truth.
Antonino Zichichi

Even while they teach, men learn.
Seneca the Younger

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
William of Ockham

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone.
John Locke

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Francis Bacon

God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is in the bosom of the Church of Christ that Science originated.
Antonino Zichichi

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.
G. W. F. Hegel

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion is the sign of the oppressed … it is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus

Science presents itself today, to the culture of our time, as the most powerful bulwark for corroborating that Galilean Faith in nature with Truth, as bearer of the footprints of the Creator.
Antonino Zichichi

Believing in God is more logical and scientific than believing in nothing.
Antonino Zichichi

Philosophy is written in this great book that is continually open before our eyes (I say the universe), but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language, and to know the characters, in which it is written. He is written in mathematical language, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible humanly to understand a word of them; without these it is a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell

He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors.
Martin Heidegger

Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
John Stuart Mill

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.
G. W. F. Hegel