Quotable Quotes

PHILOSOPHY IS...

  • The unexamined life is not worth living. - Socrates
  • Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do. - Bertrand Russell
  • The feeling of wonder is the mark of the philosopher, for all philosophy begins in wonder. - Plato
  • Philosophy is the highest music. - Plato
  • The safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. - Alfred North Whitehead
  • The first step towards philosophy is incredulity. - Denis Diderot
  • Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers. - John Churton Collins
  • It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true. - George Santayana
  • Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence. - Charles W. Eliot
  • The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow. - Sir William Osler
  • Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy. - William Shakespeare
  • 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 means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly. - Walter Kaufmann
  • The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. - William James
  • A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men- s minds about to religion. - Francis Bacon

RELIGION IS . . .

  • What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. - Albert Einstein
  • Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern. - Paul Tillich
  • One- s religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success. - Sir James M. Barrie, from a novel
  • By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. - Sir James G. Frazer
  • Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. - Karl Marx
  • Marxism is a religion. It presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation. - Joseph Alois Schumpeter
  • There- s nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms/ As rum and true religion. - Lord Byron, from a poem
  • If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness, and it guides - by - precepts - backed by the full force of its authority. - Sigmund Freud
  • Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. - Sigmund Freud
  • When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England. - Henry Fielding, from - Pastor Thwackum- in a novel
  • In their religion they are so uneven, / That each man goes his own byway to heaven. - Daniel Defoe, from a poem
  • Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something which is the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest. - Alfred North Whitehead
  • If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest. - William James