Top 212 Philosopher Quotes

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t -it’s human.

My profession is I’m a dissident philosopher.

Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this earth.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time – of one thing preceding another – the effort to establish causality is a mug’s game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

I’m most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

We came in as organizers before creating the Black Lives Matter network and project, and we are still organizers, strategists, political thinkers, and philosophers, so we actually have a lot ideas and a lot of really thought out strategies.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.

To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.

Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the ‘Zhuangzi’ is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells… and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they’d read or understood.

Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.

Nature’s God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics – it’s not talking about things that have affected computer science; it’s mathematical logic.

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

I’m not like a preacher or philosopher, but at the end of the day, life is about happiness.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

I’m extremely close to my mother. She’s always meant a lot to me and has held the place of friend, philosopher and guide in my life.

What I really love about philosophers and psychologists is that they sound smart.

If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

As a philosopher, I’m not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.

It’s very strange: if you’re a philosopher or musician or an artist, people automatically believe you can see the future. Even if they don’t like you, they accept your vision as an individual.

I’ve found a very good friend and a philosopher in Trivikram.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that’s the direction.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.’

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of ‘opposing truths at extremes’ is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn’t exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.

There are few circumstances which so strongly distinguish the philosopher, as the calmness with which he can reply to criticisms he may think undeservedly severe.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

I think any good standup or actor is part philosopher, part psychologist and sociologist, because you’re constantly recreating behaviors.

Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.

For centuries many of the world’s distinguished philosophers have assaulted Christianity as being irrational, superstitious and absurd.

As long as I have the talent and there’s a demand for the old Chinese man – whether he’s a philosopher, or a master, or an old-time restaurant owner, or a villain, or a so-called good guy – I will always be working.

The figure of Satan and the fires of hell have been demythologized by modern Christian biblical scholars, theologians and philosophers.

All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers.

The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.

Einstein’s results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect ‘on’ things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect.

I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

When I wrote my first album, I was reading Joseph Campbell – he’s this philosopher who writes about mythology. That inspired the title, ‘No Mythologies to Follow.’

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn’t effective unless you had a journal. That’s about all I know.

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations – a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency – without ever reaching anything approaching consensus.

We are political animals, as, not without reason, affirmed Aristotle, who perhaps influenced humanity’s thinking more than any other ancient philosopher through his almost 200 treatises, according to reports, of which only 31 have been preserved.

That was sort of the ‘Second City’ approach, which was try to be intelligent and assume your audience is intelligent. We were influenced by ‘Monty Python,’ too, which would have philosophers in a wrestling match.

Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical system where all the subjects can be taught.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he’s just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to… it’s the best way to testify, to be a witness.

The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.

I’m not a minister, I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a politician, I’m in another category.

The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again. Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of Right and Left.

For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

In my office, I have a very beautiful marble bust of Seneca. I always have my eye on him when I’m taking phone calls. He’s one of the many philosophers I’ve always read and admired.

Simon Critchley’s ‘The Book of Dead Philosophers’ – it’s a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

I’m really clear about what my life mission is now. There’s no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I’ve returned to the athlete I once was. I’m integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he’s funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he’s not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

If I had my way there would be a philosopher sitting round the table on every committee and in every boardroom.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

A philosopher once said, ‘Half of good philosophy is good grammar.’

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and again to provide solutions with nothing remaining: prefab solved problems.

I am not a philosopher, only frustrated by the development of the world we live in – and too stupid to keep my mouth shut when I see injustice.

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

The wall at Le Philosophe is covered with French philosophers, and supposedly, if you are able to name all of them, they will pay for your meal. I was only able to identify Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Descartes and, I think, Foucault. And, I think, Luce Irigaray.

I think, when people hear the word ‘philosophy,’ they think of Plato and a bunch of people sitting around in their robes pontificating about life and how it should be. But really, somebody who is an active philosopher should not only be thinking of these things but putting them into practice.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.

There was once a philosopher who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.’ That’s about where I am.

Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers – not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians – have sought answers in their subject’s childhood.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

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

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

I worked among many famous philosophers, and I tried to observe how they treated students. I knew which ones I wanted to be like, and which ones I didn’t.

No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it’s the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

I felt the question of the afterlife was the black hole of the personal universe: something for which substantial proof of existence had been offered but which had not yet been explored in the proper way by scientists and philosophers.

There’s no books out there articulating what the alt-right is. If they’re such great philosophers, and they have such good ideas, and they’re on the vanguard of intellectualism, where are their books? They don’t have any.

Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.

It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions.

Brazil is a country largely resistant to ideology. This is a strange fact given its founding by followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who inscribed an epigram from his philosophy of positivism in the national flag: Order and Progress.

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

Women do not often fall in love with philosophers.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Success is a lousy teacher, but failure is a friend, philosopher, and guide.

Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations – Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others – were natives of Europe and America.

I grew up in a household that really encouraged reading and writing. My mother loves philosophy and is constantly reading philosophy and talking to me about different philosophers and different ways of life.

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it’s a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

The world’s philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.

A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then – and not until then – will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

The ancient Greek philosophers were blonde and blue-eyed and, even then, talked about how their race was mixed with others and how this affected their society negatively. When there were no more natural blondes and no more blue eyes in Greece, they incidentally stopped producing great philosophers.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I’m really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

Teenagers are philosophers. They are thinking about the big things like existence and identity at a time when their identities are changing so fast.

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages… in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

I see the beard and cloak, but I don’t yet see a philosopher.

We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is – so that he neither seek it nor flee it.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human – which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race’s distinguishing characteristics – children must be surrounded by animal imagery.

Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.

If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

I’m a teacher and a philosopher by nature… In the end, I’m trying to teach people to live a better life. And if I can do that on top of entertain, then I leave the world a better place.

Back in 2000, I had come to a crossroads in my life, unsure about what career path I should pursue. Shepherd, bouncer, philosopher king, ventriloquist or perhaps man on the flying trapeze. Fortunately, I was guided back onto the path of the magical world of music.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

You wouldn’t believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn’t seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

I’ve been very fortunate and met the guys that have become, basically, philosophers and have a kind of sensibility about life that’s very precious.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Snoopy was a philosopher in a way.

I’m an artist, not a philosopher.

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West – but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

I want to read philosophers.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

Sometimes I am glad I am not a philosopher – how would I ever complete a single chain of thought when someone is constantly asking me to do something? I don’t think Plato would have been able to write his dialogues if he had a wife who kept bugging him to pass the pita bread.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Summertime, and the reading is easy… Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.

Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.

There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.

I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author. It’s only me.

The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.