Every quote ever shared on the page could, in some way or another, be classified as “philosophy.” However, for those looking for quotes strictly from those who would be studied in a college philosophy class, we’ve summoned our favorites.
“Conquer yourself rather than the world.”
Rene Descartes
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
Aristotle
“I think, therefore I am.”
Rene Descartes
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
Plato
“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”
Plato
“For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.”
Plato
“My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.”
Aristotle
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
Plato
“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“Most of us are absolutely certain that we wouldn’t hesitate to save a drowning child, and that we would do it at considerable cost to ourselves. Yet while thousands of children die each day, we spend money on things we take for granted, and would hardly miss if they were not there. Is that wrong? If so, how far does our obligation to the poor go?”
Peter Singer
“The study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.”
Thomas Aquinas
“Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.”
Blaise Pascal
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
Plato
“We are our choices.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy.”
Epicurus
“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child, than from the discourse of men who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.”
John Locke
“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”
Bertrand Russell
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
Aristotle
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
Henry David Thoreau
“It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Henry David Thoreau
“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.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, a new form of servitude.”
Friedrich Hayek
“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Plato
“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
Sophocles
“Most people in 1st world nations would say they’d save a child’s life if they were capable and it was well within their means. They then turn on the TV and change the channel when a UNICEF commercial asks for one dollar a day to save a child’s life.”
Peter Singer
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.”
Henry David Thoreau
“He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears.”
Seneca
Esse quam videri is a Latin phrase meaning “To be, rather than to seem.”
Cicero
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Our next aim will be to avoid working either for pointless ends or pointlessly.”
Seneca
“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and the truth rewarded me.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”
Seneca
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”
Theophrastus
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
Pericles
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.”
Aristotle
“What I always needed most to cure and restore myself, however, was the belief that I was not the only one to be thus, to see thus.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them.”
Confucius
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”
Martin Heidegger
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
Martin Heidegger
“The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us, and which touches us so profoundly, that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing what it is.”
Blaise Pascal
“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others.”
Bertrand Russell
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Henry David Thoreau
“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
Bertrand Russell
“If you wish to be good, first believe that you are bad.”
Epictetus
“Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.”
Blaise Pascal
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”
Homer
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
Thucydides
“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
Blaise Pascal
“To understand is to forgive.”
Blaise Pascal
“No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself.”
Pythagoras
“Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.”
Cato The Elder
“I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.”
Blaise Pascal
“But you should avoid those in particular those of a melancholy disposition who find cause for tears in everything.”
Seneca
“To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive what a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought.”
David Hume
“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”
Seneca
“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
Seneca
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Henry David Thoreau
“The first need is to free ourselves of that worst form of contemporary obscurantism which tries to persuade us that what we have done in the recent past was all either wise or unavoidable. We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.”
F.A. Hayek
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Epictetus
“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
Seneca
“Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.”
Immanuel Kant
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”
Seneca
“Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
Marcel Proust
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
Michel de Montaigne
“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“Look around you — the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are foolish and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
Voltaire
“We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.”
Voltaire
“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
Immanuel Kant
“Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.”
Rene Descartes
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
“The things that we love tell us what we are.”
Thomas Aquinas
“You are afraid of dying. But, come now, how is this life of yours anything but death?”
Seneca
“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
Voltaire
“There exists above the ‘productive’ man a yet higher species.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
Bertrand Russell
“City life is millions of people being lonesome together.”
Henry David Thoreau
“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.”
Aristotle
“Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.”
Bertrand Russell
“The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.”
Sophocles
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.”
Immanuel Kant
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal
“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”
Thomas Aquinas
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Heraclitus
“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Yet, I didn’t understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“I love mankind, he said, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.”
Voltaire
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
Henry David Thoreau
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
Henry David Thoreau
“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
William Wordsworth
“What worries you, masters you.”
John Locke
“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Plato
“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
Friedrich A. Hayek
“I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”
Friedrich A. Hayek
“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
Friedrich A. Hayek
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed, Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.”
Seneca
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Seneca
“My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Be wary lest by reading too many writers and too many different kinds of books your brain becomes confused and addled. If you wish to extract something useful from your reading, you should feed your mind only with those writers of undoubted worth. Read therefore only those books which have been recognized as unquestionably good. And if you should ever feel the urge to turn to any other sort of book, always remember to return to the first kind.”
Seneca
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
Martin Heidegger
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Epictetus
“Character is simply habit long continued.”
Plutarch
“It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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