Quotes About Philosophy

This theory, then, is in the first place based on an erroneous assumption--viz., that abstinence from things lawful is intrinsically a higher sort of virtue than temperance in the use of them. This is not true. Abstinence is the virtue of the weak, temperance is the virtue of the strong.

Any one who tells you that Anarchists don't believe in organization is talking nonsense. Organization is everything, and everything is organization.

The faculties of the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined, with satisfactory precision, by all the efforts of the most acute and metaphysical philosophers. Sense, perception, judgment, desire, volition, memory, imagination, are found to be separated by such delicate shades and minute gradations that their boundaries have eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of ingenious disquisition and controversy.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.

My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has d——d few virtues. Good-day.

We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.

Wisdom is balance, and a three-legged stance (old man), like a three-legged stool, offers the best balance. When one has become older, one knows that doing is valid only when it enhances being and that thinking makes sense only if it stems from feeling.

Skeptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about.

I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.

But is eternity an alternative to life? Isn't it, on the contrary, the case that it is when one wants everything to be eternal that one most loves life and the world.

Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave: Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise, - His pride in reasoning, not in acting lies

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have

Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise; His pride in reasoning, not in acting, lies

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,A hero perish or a sparrow fall,Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.

Say first, of God above or man below,What can we reason but from what we know?

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mindSees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;His soul proud Science never taught to strayFar as the solar walk or milky way;Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, an humbler heav'n.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.

A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practise it.

Whatever is, is right.

Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Why charge we Heav'n in those, in these acquit? In both, to reason right is to submit.