Quotations about Philosophy

When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth. ~Albert Einstein


Philosophy is nothing but common sense in a dress suit. ~Author Unknown


Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself. ~Socrates, in Diogenes Laertius

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. ~Voltaire


We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy. ~Martin L. Gross


The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. ~Bertrand Russell


Leisure is the mother of Philosophy. ~Thomas Hobbes


Philosophy is just a hobby. You can't open a philosophy factory. ~Dewey Selmon


The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals. ~Martin H. Fischer


God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


My definition of a philosopher is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. ~Louisa May Alcott

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. ~Alfred North Whitehead


If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera. ~John Rich


All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. ~Ambrose Bierce


Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. ~George Berkeley


To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action. And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace. ~Aristotle


Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution. ~Robert Zend


Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. ~Immanuel Kant


Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. ~Aldous Huxley


Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures. ~Nicolas Chamfort


Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines. ~Bertrand Russell


ose Bierce