Quotes about philosophers-and-philosophy

If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

— Mark Twain

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

— Source Unknown

The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.

— Voltaire

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.

— Voltaire

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

— Simone Weil

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

— Alfred North Whitehead

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.

— William Butler Yeats

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.

— Robert Zend

we try so hard to live free, only to die and be confined to a brass prison

— Onwuka Emeka

on the backdrop of eternity, time is a relatively new concept.

— Onwuka Emeka

There is no school of philosophy that approaches ordinary common sense.

— Michael Lipsey

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

— Carl Edward Sagan

You are ninety-eight cents' worth of cosmic star dust floating at the obscure edge of an ordinary galaxy, and yet you are the center of your own world; to friends and family, you may be precious beyond all worth. On one day, humanity seems the apex of all things beautiful, generous, mindful; another day, it seems a stupid beast.

— K.C. Cole

I look down into the bubbling cauldron of clouds, pierced by an occasional unfriendly mountain peak. We seem to be skimming the surface of an angry sea, and I think it unbelievable that delicate life-forms can exist down there...

— K Cole

How rich are we that we can look on these worlds with the perspective of modern science ... that we do not have to wonder as did former men whether stars are jewels hanging from celestial drapery or peepholes in the astral skin of creation!

— Guy Murchie

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

— James Lovelock

The hardest knife ill-used doth lose its edge

— William Shakespeare

Problems are opportunities in work clothes

— Henry John Kaiser

For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently, However they have writ the style of gods And made a push at chance and sufferance.

— William Shakespeare