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Quotes about philosophy

250 quotes from 124 people

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Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
David Hume1711–1776A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding, Part 4, Section 7
- Thinking
I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Stephen Hawking1942–2018Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993), pp. 133–135.
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain Banks1954–2013The Algebraist (2004), Chapter 5, “Conditions of Passage” (p. 298)
All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
J. R. R. Tolkien1892–1973On Fairy-Stories (1939)
- Theology
- Writing
The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world “God” is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word “world”.
Arthur Schopenhauer1788–1860On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn
- God
A thing isn’t quite real until you name it.
Jordan Petersonborn 1962“Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death”
My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’
Philip K. Dick1928–1982Statement of 1975 quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8, Part 1 (1981)
I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.
Jonathan Edwards1703–1758The Freedom of the Will (1754).
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.
Robert Louis Stevenson1850–1894An Inland Voyage (1878).
- Religion
- Theology
The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1770–1831Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)
- Wisdom
To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1770–1831Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Preface
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
José Saramago1922–2010Blindness (1995), p. 276
A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.
Umberto Eco1932–2016Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), [O] : Introduction, 0.7
- Change
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
Michel Foucault1926–1984“The Subject and Power” (1982), p. 785
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God.
Paul Tillich1886–1965Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (1955), p. 80
- God
- Theology