Best 2580 quotes in «philosophical quotes» category

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Truly, I'm not joking when I thank my lucky stars for the awful operation I had, since it has made me young again and philosophical which means that I don't want to fritter away the new lease on life I've been given.

Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.

Trust one who has tried.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

Veganism isn’t just a strict vegetarian diet; it is a complete philosophical viewpoint. It is practical in outlook, simple to understand and aspires to the highest environmental and spiritual values. I am sure it holds the key to a future lifestyle for a humane planetary guardianship.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.

Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

We are each a dozen people who were all the same child.

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

We are spirits clad in veils.

We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We discussed it for centuries in metaphysical, economic, biological, and philosophical terms; we listened to all the arguments pro and con, we read all the testimonies of slaves and witnesses, and we decided. Though this 'we" is not everybody on earth, or even most people, who've never thought about slavery much.

... we can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

We cannot pass our guardian angel's bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.

We come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious indeed; and moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

We have embarked globally on a path of unsustainable development. Our lifestyles, the way we produce goods and services, are all part of a system that is completely unsustainable. I see solutions to climate change leading to a much larger philosophical shift in the way human society develops. We need a new matrix to define what human progress is.

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Well begun is half done.

Well-ordered self-love is right and natural.

We must honor our dragons, encourage them to be worthy destroyers, expect they'll strive to cut us down. It is their duty to ridicule us, it is their job to demean us, to force us if they can to stop being different! And when we walk our way no matter their fire and their fury, our dragons shrug when we're out of sight, return to their card-games philosophical: 'Ah well, we can't toast 'em all...'

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.

We are brought into this world cold, weak, and helpless. Then it gets worse.

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.

We often confuse spiritual knowledge with spiritual attainment. Spirituality is not a matter of knowing scriptures and engaging in philosophical discussions. It is a matter of heart culture, of unmeasurable strength.

We ought not to believe those who today, adopting a philosophical air and with a tone of superiority, prophesy the decline of culter and are content with the unknowable in a self-satisfied way. For us there is no unknowable, and in my opinion there is also non whatsoever for the natural sciences. In place of this foolish unknowable, let our watchword on the contrary be: we must know - we shall know.