• Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.

  

  William Blake

  PainterBritish1757 · 18th century

  3.8 · 28 votes · 120 reads

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• Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

  3.4 · 40 votes · 3 reads

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• Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

  

  Alfred North Whitehead

  MathematicianEnglish1861 · 19th century

  4.3 · 45 votes · 150 reads

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• For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.

  

  William Shakespeare

  WriterBritish1564 · 16th century

  3.7 · 64 votes · 116 reads

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• How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns.

  

  John Milton

  PoetEnglish1608 · 17th century

  4.1 · 54 votes · 112 reads

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• I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

  

  Lord Byron

  PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

  3.7 · 38 votes · 86 reads

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• I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.

  

  William Hazlitt

  EssayistBritish1778 · 18th century

  4.1 · 52 votes · 76 reads

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• I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin a

  

  Samuel Johnson

  AuthorBritish1709 · 18th century

  4.6 · 53 votes · 86 reads

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• If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the Writerof this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

  

  Mark Twain

  WriterAmerican1835 · 19th century

  4.0 · 51 votes · 34 reads

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• If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

  G

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  ScientistGerman1742 · 18th century

  4.1 · 17 votes · 112 reads

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• In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

  I

  Iris Murdoch

  NovelistBritish1919 · 20th century

  4.6 · 39 votes · 62 reads

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• In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

  

  Thomas Alva Edison

  ScientistAmerican1847 · 19th century

  3.1 · 44 votes · 195 reads

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• It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

  L

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  PhilosopherAustrian1889 · 19th century

  3.0 · 28 votes · 91 reads

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• Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

  A

  Anonymous

  3.6 · 51 votes · 177 reads

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• Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools.

  

  Proverb

  Anonymous

  3.8 · 59 votes · 40 reads

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• Mathematicians are like Frenchman: whatever you say to them they translate Into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

  A

  Anonymous

  3.5 · 49 votes · 46 reads

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• Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas

  

  Thomas Fuller

  AuthorBritish1608 · 17th century

  3.2 · 15 votes · 86 reads

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• Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

  

  Bertrand Russell

  PhilosopherBritish1872 · 19th century

  3.8 · 8 votes · 2 reads

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• Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

  3.5 · 53 votes · 74 reads

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• Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

  

  Bertrand Russell

  PhilosopherBritish1872 · 19th century

  4.3 · 8 votes · 37 reads

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• Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

  

  Sir Thomas Browne

  AuthorEnglish1605 · 17th century

  4.2 · 42 votes · 14 reads

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• Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  4.9 · 15 votes · 164 reads

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• Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham

  WriterBritish1874 · 19th century

  4.6 · 21 votes · 74 reads

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• Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

  

  Charles Dickens

  NovelistBritish1812 · 19th century

  3.5 · 52 votes · 131 reads

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• Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

  S

  Sophocles

  PoetGreek

  4.6 · 51 votes · 131 reads

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• 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.

  

  Henry Louis Mencken

  JournalistAmerican1880 · 19th century

  3.1 · 13 votes · 142 reads

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• Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

  

  Seneca

  PhilosopherRoman-4 · 1st century BC

  4.5 · 40 votes · 181 reads

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• Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.

  

  Charles Caleb Colton

  AuthorBritish1780 · 18th century

  4.8 · 23 votes · 157 reads

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• Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

  

  Pierre Beaumarchais

  PlaywrightFrench1732 · 18th century

  3.6 · 41 votes · 165 reads

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

  

  William Hazlitt

  EssayistBritish1778 · 18th century

  3.9 · 51 votes · 33 reads

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• Philosophy is doubt.

  M

  Montaigne

  PhilosopherFrench1533 · 16th century

  5.0 · 34 votes · 197 reads

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• Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

  L

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  PhilosopherAustrian1889 · 19th century

  4.4 · 64 votes · 141 reads

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• Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

  L

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  PhilosopherAustrian1889 · 19th century

  5.0 · 33 votes · 49 reads

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• Philosophy is the product of wonder.

  

  Alfred North Whitehead

  MathematicianEnglish1861 · 19th century

  4.8 · 7 votes · 188 reads

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• Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

  

  Karl Marx

  EconomistGerman1818 · 19th century

  4.5 · 42 votes · 57 reads

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• Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

  

  Francis Bacon

  PhilosopherBritish1561 · 16th century

  4.5 · 24 votes · 167 reads

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• Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

  

  Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

  PoetFrench1636 · 17th century

  3.6 · 35 votes · 50 reads

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• Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

  

  Ambrose Bierce

  WriterAmerican1842 · 19th century

  3.8 · 50 votes · 44 reads

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• Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

  I

  Iris Murdoch

  NovelistBritish1919 · 20th century

  3.7 · 21 votes · 65 reads

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• Plato was a bore.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

  3.0 · 21 votes · 102 reads

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• Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

  

  Lord Byron

  PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

  3.8 · 61 votes · 155 reads

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• Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

  E

  Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

  PoliticianBritish1803 · 19th century

  3.7 · 31 votes · 151 reads

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• Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

  

  Marcus Tulius Cicero

  PoliticianRoman-106 · 2nd century BC

  4.9 · 20 votes · 130 reads

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• So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

  G

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  ScientistGerman1742 · 18th century

  3.2 · 43 votes · 122 reads

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• Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

  

  Jean Jacques Rousseau

  PoliticianSwiss1712 · 18th century

  4.5 · 24 votes · 9 reads

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• Tell me what gives a man or woman their greatest pleasure and I'll tell you their philosophy of life.

  D

  Dale Carnegie

  WriterAmerican1888 · 19th century

  3.8 · 30 votes · 18 reads

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• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

  

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  PoetBritish1874 · 19th century

  3.5 · 15 votes · 111 reads

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• The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

  

  Blaise Pascal

  PhilosopherFrench1623 · 17th century

  4.9 · 50 votes · 19 reads

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• The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

  

  Denis Diderot

  PhilosopherFrench1713 · 18th century

  4.7 · 41 votes · 8 reads

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• The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

  

  George Bernard Shaw

  WriterIrish1856 · 19th century

  3.5 · 31 votes · 73 reads

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• The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.

  

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

  PoetGerman1749 · 18th century

  3.8 · 17 votes · 111 reads

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• The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham

  WriterBritish1874 · 19th century

  4.4 · 7 votes · 173 reads

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• The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

  

  Karl Marx

  EconomistGerman1818 · 19th century

  4.2 · 50 votes · 61 reads

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• The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

  

  Simone de Beauvoir

  NovelistFrench1908 · 20th century

  3.9 · 13 votes · 8 reads

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• The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  3.6 · 19 votes · 89 reads

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• The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. - The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

  L

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  PhilosopherAustrian1889 · 19th century

  4.2 · 36 votes · 162 reads

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• There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

  

  William Shakespeare

  WriterBritish1564 · 16th century

  4.3 · 16 votes · 149 reads

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• There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

  D

  Daniel Bernoulli

  MathematicianDutch1700 · 17th century

  4.7 · 55 votes · 37 reads

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• There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.

  

  Henry Louis Mencken

  JournalistAmerican1880 · 19th century

  3.0 · 12 votes · 183 reads

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• There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only g

  

  Norman Vincent Peale

  AuthorAmerican1898 · 19th century

  3.6 · 20 votes · 117 reads

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• There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

  

  Marcus Tulius Cicero

  PoliticianRoman-106 · 2nd century BC

  4.2 · 12 votes · 190 reads

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• There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.

  

  René Descartes

  MathematicianFrench1596 · 16th century

  4.3 · 41 votes · 20 reads

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• Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

  

  Albert Camus

  NovelistFrench1913 · 20th century

  3.4 · 21 votes · 21 reads

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• 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 according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.5 · 57 votes · 91 reads

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• To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

  

  William Hazlitt

  EssayistBritish1778 · 18th century

  3.2 · 39 votes · 130 reads

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• To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

  

  Blaise Pascal

  PhilosopherFrench1623 · 17th century

  3.1 · 26 votes · 95 reads

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• Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

  H

  Henry Brooks Adams

  NovelistAmerican1838 · 19th century

  4.5 · 36 votes · 151 reads

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

  

  Francis Bacon

  PhilosopherBritish1561 · 16th century

  4.6 · 6 votes · 113 reads

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• We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourse

  G

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  ScientistGerman1742 · 18th century

  3.8 · 48 votes · 70 reads

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• What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.3 · 26 votes · 50 reads

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• When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

  C

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  MathematicianGerman1777 · 18th century

  3.6 · 43 votes · 153 reads

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• When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  4.3 · 54 votes · 41 reads

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• When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

  C

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  MathematicianGerman1777 · 18th century

  3.1 · 6 votes · 36 reads

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• While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as th

  

  Thomas Hobbes

  PhilosopherBritish1588 · 16th century

  4.1 · 10 votes · 29 reads

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• Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

  H

  Herman Melville

  WriterAmerican1819 · 19th century

  4.9 · 20 votes · 174 reads

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• Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

  

  Lewis Carroll

  NovelistEnglish1832 · 19th century

  4.7 · 43 votes · 50 reads

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