Philosophy Quotes

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

All philosophies, if you ride them, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.

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

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

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

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

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

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the Universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.

All men desire to know.

Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not you'll become a philosopher.

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.

I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

No sooner do we depart from sense and instinct to follow reason but we are insensibly drawn into uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance in speculation; till at length, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn scepticism.

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

What do you know and how do you know it?

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers...and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

An unexamined life is not worth living.