philosophy quotes

Ambrose Bierce: 

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Bertrand Russell: 

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.

Cicero: 

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

Corliss Lamont: 

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Freda Adler: 

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

George Bernard Shaw: 

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

H. L. Mencken: 

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Henry Ward Beecher: 

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

Immanuel Kant: 

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

John Adams: 

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John D. Rockefeller: 

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

John Dewey: 

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy


John W. Gardner: 

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Mark Twain: 

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
1908, notebook


Mark Twain: 

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

Plato: 

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Thornton Wilder: 

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy. 
The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942


Thucydides: 

History is Philosophy teaching by examples.

William James: 

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
Pragmatism (1907)


William James: 

If a man's good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy.

William James: 

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.