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Quotes about philosophy

250 quotes from 124 people

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I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything.
Tim Berners-Leeborn 1955Weaving the Web (1999)
- Knowledge
A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.
Cyrano de Bergerac1619–1655The Other World (1657)
- Nature
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
Erwin Schrödinger1887–1961My View of the World (written 1925, published 1961)
- Life & Death
Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.
Claude Lévi-Strauss1908–2009Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 38: A Little Glass of Rum, p. 392
Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
Vladimir Lenin1870–1924Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic — Book III: Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion (December 1914)
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.
Eleanor Roosevelt1884–1962You Learn by Living (1960), Foreword
- Decisions
I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza1632–1677Letter 74 (76) to Albert Burgh (1675)
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.
Philip Roth1933–2018The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
Jack Kerouac1922–1969“The Origins of the Beat Generation” in Playboy (June 1959)
Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided … it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.
Dag Hammarskjöld1905–1961Vägmärken · Markings (1963), 26 December 1956
- History
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.
David Hume1711–1776An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
- Life & Death
The illusion of free will… is itself an illusion.
Sam Harrisborn 1967Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will.
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.
Erwin Schrödinger1887–1961Mind and Matter (1958), Ch. 4, “The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind” (written in English; Wilber’s 1984 anthology reprints it)
It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low.
Leo Strauss1899–1973Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 225
Strictly speaking, relativism does not permit social progress, because the new culture is by definition no better than the one it replaced.
Dinesh D'Souzaborn 1961The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 6
- Change