Quotes About Philosophy

While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

Being is the great explainer.

Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses

He understood, as he would write in Walking, that the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Alles, was unserer körperlichen Ernährung und Pflege dient, lassen wir uns mehr kosten als unsere geistige Ernährung.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

The simple style is bad for the savage because he does worse than to obtain the luxuries of life; it is good for the philosopher because he does better than to work for them. The question is whether you can bear freedom....

Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, "Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.

that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

One farmer says to me, You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

I don't want to feel as if my life were a sojourn any longer. That philosophy cannot be true which so paints it. It is time now that I begin to live.

It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.

The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.