Quotes About Philosophy

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

Consider, for example, Jefferson's essay, penned in 1764 at the age of twenty-one, on the question, "Whether Christianity is part of the Common Law?"63 His answer was confident and unequivocal: "We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.

A story should have a point, but a life doesn't need one. It just needs to be lived.

According to the philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville: The wise man has nothing left to expect or to hope for. Because he is entirely happy, he needs nothing. Because he needs nothing, he is entirely happy.

During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.

Knowledge is the heaviest weight of all.

I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.

if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who's not after your soul.

You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense." "Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean.

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

The truth or falsehood of all of man's conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.

There were three questions that no one answered or asked: "What constituted proof?" "What constituted need?" "Essential—to whom?

I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose.

Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.

Reason is the most naive of all superstitions.

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.

courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.