Philosophy Quotes

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.

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.