Socrates termed philosophy the preparation for death; but should it not rather be styled the patient endurance of life? – The Countess of Blessington, Desultory Thoughts and Reflections, 1839
Philosophy is nothing but common sense in a dress suit. – Author unknown
You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct. – Madame Gout to Mr. Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,”
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, Lives
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. – Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy. – Martin L. Gross, A Call for Revolution, 1993
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, Leviathan, 1651
The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
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, in Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. E.D. Cheney, 1889
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, Epigrams
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
Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution. – Robert Zend
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. – Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations, 1950
Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures. – Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et penseés
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
