Quotes About Philosophy

As Socrates said, "True learning is remembering.

A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

The only words worth repeating are from the Old Testament or Oscar Wilde.

I have little interest in streamlining the government or in making it more efficient, for I intend to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.

Yes, pain meant life. But the symmetric property did not apply; Life did not mean pain.

Life amuses me, Jasper. Until it don't no more." He grinned. "When you're a happy guy, you find amusement in all kinds of places. Even in here.

I consider it the me-equivalent of the Bible-most likely full of nonsense, but comforting to fantasize about.

non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—" I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.

We would do well to remember that the great pragmatist William James dedicated his extraordinarily wide-ranging Varieties of Religious Experience to none other than John Stuart Mill.

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.

Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.

Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.

No reason compels me to maintain that the body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse. And, indeed, experience seems to urge a different conclusion. Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.