Quotes About Philosophy

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.

The superior man has a dignified ease without pride. The mean man has pride without a dignified ease.

The wise man delights in water, the Good man delights in mountains. For the wise move; but the Good stay still. The wise are happy; but the good secure.

Many seek happiness higher than men; others beneath him. But happiness is the same height as man.

Sincerity is that whereby self-completion is effected, and its way is that by which man must direct himself.

The unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so.

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.

Euripides says,-Who knows but that this life is really death,And whether death is not what men call life?

Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

What terrible fear causes Man to address the Void as Thou?

We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.

Man is a robot with defects.

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?

"But to be hanged - is that not unendurable?" Even so, when a man feels that it is reasonable, he goes off and hangs himself.

A man that seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.

Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."