Quotes on Philosophy

For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers.

Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.

Pour some water into a tub and stir it up. Now try as hard as you can to calm the water with your hands; you will succeed in agitating it further. Let it stand undisturbed a while, and it will calm down by itself. The human brain works much the same way.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

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

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.