Philosopher Quotes

Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.

To those who do not love God, all things must work together immediately for pain and torment, until, by means of the tribulation, they are led to salvation at last.

Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement.

God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life.

Full surely there is a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered on it here, and in no other form than that wherein they know it here, at any moment.

By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.

By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.

He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.

A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.

The artist finds, that the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.

Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate.

Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men.

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

Humility is truth.

Fortune favors the audacious.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

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.

By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.

Your library is your paradise.

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.