Quotes About Philosophy

To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "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.

the Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza; or, better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza, or better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

The world is not "my idea," as Schopenhauer called it; it is a stern reality of which you and I are passing spawns.

We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world. 

It did not seem to Plato any insult to philosophy that it should be transformed into literature, realized as drama, and beautified with style; nor any derogation to its dignity that it should apply itself, even intelligibly, to living problems of morality and the state.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

To observe processes and construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy

physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?

he loved wisdom too much to be a "successful" man.

When I have slain an enemy," explained a Brazilian philosopher-chief, "it is surely better to eat him than to let him waste.. . . The worst is not to be eaten, but to die; if I am killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I could not think of any game that would taste better than he would. . . . You whites are really too dainty.

All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew more and more about less and less, and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more. The specialist put on blinders in order to shut out from his vision all the world but one little spot, to which he glued his nose. Perspective was lost. Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom. Every science, and every branch of philosophy, developed

Frederick agreed that the punishment of La Barre was extreme; for his part he would rather have condemned the youth to read the entire Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas; this, he thought, would be a fate worse than death.

Intellectualism—the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends—fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.

Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted.

says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.")

He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen.

A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it.

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.