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Quotes about philosophy

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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.522
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana1863–1952The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
- Life & Death
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.
Thornton Wilder1897–1975The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Act One
- Advice
All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.
Giordano Bruno1548–1600Cause, Principle, and Unity (1584)
Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time, but mind — which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume, in 1737.
Sydney Smith1771–1845Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849), Introduction
- Comedy
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935“Law and the Court” (1913)
The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy, as indeed of every philosophy, is happiness, but happiness that consists in living according to nature, and not according to the opinions of the multitude.
Julian331–363Oration to the Uneducated Cynics (tr. W. C. Wright, ii, 1913)
- Happiness
Like every ‘intellectual’, a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.
Louis Althusser1918–1990Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon”, p. 2
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849A Dream Within a Dream (1849).In context
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
Albert Camus1913–1960Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5
- Life & Death
Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.
Mikhail Bakunin1814–1876Man, Society, and Freedom (1871)
God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension.
Freeman Dyson1923–2020Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 6: How Will it All End?
- God
- Theology
Brahman and Śakti are identical. If you accept the one, you must accept the other.
Ramakrishna1836–1886The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 134
- God
- Theology
Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.
George MacDonald1824–1905From “Life” in Unspoken Sermons Series II (1886)
- Life & Death
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James1842–1910The Sentiment of Rationality (1882)