Quotes
Lines worth keeping
383 passages from 210 thinkers, each carrying the work it came from and how securely it can be attributed.
Thales
Pythagoras
Heraclitus
Parmenides
Democritus
- “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
- “Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold. Happiness dwells in the soul.”
- “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality, atoms and void.”
- “The soul is the same as the body's fire: it is made of small, smooth, round atoms like those of fire.”
- “Cheerfulness is the best thing for a person, and its absence makes life not worth living.”
Empedocles
- “There is only mixing and exchange of what is mixed. 'Nature' is only a name given to these things by men.”
- “Fire and water and earth and the endless height of air; and cursed Strife apart from these, balanced in every way, and Love among them, equal in length and breadth.”
- “When Love has gathered everything into one, and Strife has risen again to the top, then all things separate under its harsh governance.”
Anaxagoras
- “All things were together. Then Mind came and arranged them in order.”
- “The sun is a hot stone, larger than the Peloponnese.”
- “Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing. It is the finest of all things and the purest, and it holds all knowledge about everything and the greatest power.”
- “The sun is a fiery mass of stone, larger than the Peloponnese.”
Protagoras
- “Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.”
- “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor what form they might take; for there is much to prevent knowledge: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.”
Zeno of Elea
- “If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on to infinity.”
- “Before the arrow reaches its target, it must first reach the halfway point. But before that, the quarter. There is no first step — and so motion cannot begin.”
- “If things are many, they must be both infinitely small and infinitely large — infinitely small because the parts have no size, infinitely large because there is always another part outside.”
Socrates
- “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
- “I know that I know nothing.”
- “To find yourself, think for yourself.”
- “No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”
- “Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.”
- “We ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.”
- “To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer.”
Plato
- “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.”
- “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
- “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils.”
- “Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den.”
- “The true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying.”
- “To begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only.”
- “Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.”
- “All enquiry and all learning is but recollection.”
Aristotle
Diogenes
Epicurus
Zeno of Citium
Pyrrho
Cicero
Lucretius
Seneca
Musonius Rufus
Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius
Laozi
Confucius
Mozi
Zhuangzi
Mencius
Xunzi
Han Feizi
Al-Kindi
Al-Farabi
Ibn Sina
Al-Ghazali
Ibn Bajja
Ibn Tufayl
Ibn Rushd
The Buddha
Mahavira
Kanada
Panini
Patanjali
Nagarjuna
Akshapada Gautama
Augustine
Boethius
Anselm
Peter Abelard
Hildegard of Bingen
Thomas Aquinas
William of Ockham
Francis Bacon
Descartes
Thomas Hobbes
Spinoza
Elisabeth of Bohemia
John Locke
Leibniz
Voltaire
David Hume
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Denis Diderot
- “Scepticism is the first step towards truth.”
- “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.”
- “There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”
Adam Smith
- “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
- “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”
- “Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this, no dog exchanges bones with another.”
Immanuel Kant
Mary Wollstonecraft
- “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
- “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces.”
- “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
Anaximander
- “From what things existing things come to be, into these they pass away according to necessity; for they pay the penalty to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”
- “The earth hangs free, held up by nothing, remaining in place because it is equally distant from all things.”
Anaximenes
Plutarch
Sextus Empiricus
Plotinus
Hypatia
Sun Tzu
Gongsun Long
Shang Yang
Liezi
Al-Razi
Al-Biruni
Omar Khayyam
Suhrawardi
Kapila
Badarayana
Jaimini
Chanakya
Maimonides
Albertus Magnus
Bonaventure
Duns Scotus
Montaigne
Pascal
George Berkeley
Anne Conway
Montesquieu
Condorcet
Baron d'Holbach
Edmund Burke
Gorgias
Theophrastus
Philo of Alexandria
Porphyry
Proclus
Yang Zhu
Hui Shi
Shen Dao
Al-Ash'ari
Ibn Arabi
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
Ashvaghosha
Vasubandhu
Dignaga
John Scotus Eriugena
Roger Bacon
Meister Eckhart
Galileo Galilei
Margaret Cavendish
Pierre Bayle
Jeremy Bentham
Olympe de Gouges
Thomas Paine
Johann Gottfried Herder
Xenophanes
- “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and could draw, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.”
- “The clear truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods; for even if one should happen to say what is right, still he himself does not know it.”
Antisthenes
Iamblichus
Dio Chrysostom
Dong Zhongshu
Wang Chong
Ibn Hazm
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Bhartrhari
Dharmakirti
John of Salisbury
- “Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single difference: the prince obeys the law, and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself their servant.”
- “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants: we see more and farther than they, not because our sight is sharper, but because we are lifted by their stature.”
Hugh of Saint Victor
Giordano Bruno
Niccolò Machiavelli
Giambattista Vico
Moses Mendelssohn
G.W.F. Hegel
Arthur Schopenhauer
Søren Kierkegaard
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
William James
Gottlob Frege
Edmund Husserl
Henri Bergson
Bertrand Russell
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Martin Heidegger
Simone de Beauvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre
Hannah Arendt
Karl Popper
Frantz Fanon
John Rawls
Thomas Kuhn
Michel Foucault
Jürgen Habermas
Jacques Derrida
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
- “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.”
- “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world — an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.”
Judith Butler
Kwame Anthony Appiah
David Chalmers
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
- “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
- “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.”
Leo Tolstoy
Rabindranath Tagore
W.E.B. Du Bois
Steve Biko
- “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
- “You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.”
- “Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression.”
Tertullian
Origen
Apuleius
Gregory of Nyssa
Nishida Kitaro
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Paul Ricoeur
Iris Murdoch
Alasdair MacIntyre
bell hooks
Cornel West
Kwasi Wiredu
- “Philosophy always operates against the background of a given conceptual framework, which itself is not, in the main, the product of philosophical reflection.”
- “The idea that African modes of thought are essentially mystical rather than rational is one of the most fundamental confusions in the study of African philosophy.”
Enrique Dussel
Chrysippus
Galen
A.N. Whitehead
C.S. Peirce
- “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
- “The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community.”
John Dewey
Auguste Comte
Ludwig Feuerbach
Albert Camus
Gilles Deleuze
Ibn Khaldun
Adi Shankara
Noam Chomsky
Saul Kripke
John Searle
Thomas Nagel
Elizabeth Anscombe
Simone Weil
Friedrich Engels
W.V.O. Quine
Jacques Lacan
Richard Rorty
Carneades
- “The wise man will sometimes even give his opinion on things about which he cannot be certain, provided he distinguishes and warns that the matter is not certain.”
- “Justice, if it existed at all, would consist in an equal regard for the interests of all — but no nation that means to be great can practice it.”
Aristippus of Cyrene
Zou Yan
Ibn al-Haytham
- “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and puts his trust in them, but one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.”
- “Light travels through transparent bodies in straight lines only... and vision occurs through the forms of light and color reaching the eye from visible objects.”