Quotes About Philosophy

Men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

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 accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - from Live Without Principle

Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

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

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not 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.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

It is a distinct fact by itself, which we can hold and examine separately, that on purely natural principles the soul that is left to itself unwatched, uncultivated, unredeemed, must fall away into death by its own nature.

These lower correspondences are in their nature unfitted for an Eternal Life. Even if they were perfect in their relation to their Environment, they would still not be Eternal. However opposed, apparently, to the scientific definition of Eternal Life, it is yet true that perfect correspondence with Environment is not Eternal Life. . . . An Eternal Life demands an Eternal Environment.

The republic of letters.

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

I'm no romantic, surfing, California boy. I like reading, writing, philosophizing. Scheming. I've been doing some exploration of the inner space.

Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.

Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI's challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.