50 of the best philosophy quotes, ranging from Ancient Greece through to modern times. Perfect for making sense out of life, the universe, and everything!
Top Philosophical Quotes
This collection of philosophical words and quotes is drawn from all eras of human history. Including Greek philosophers quotes, words from modern thinkers, and amazing insights, this list is designed to make you think.
Whilst my blog is normally about travel, philosophy plays an important part in my life. Of all the philosophical schools, I would consider myself more a Stoic than anything else.
Another connection of course, is that I now live in Greece. You could say it is the birthplace of Western philosophy!
I hope you enjoy these best philosophical sayings and thoughts as much as I did putting them together.Philosophy Quotes
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
– Socrates
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”
– William of Ockham
“The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
– Thomas Hobbes
“I think therefore I am” (“Cogito, ergo sum”)
– René Descartes
“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors”
– Martin Heidegger
“We live in the best of all possible worlds”
– Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational”
– G. W. F. Hegel
“God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”
– Albert Camus
Philosophy Quotations
“One cannot step twice in the same river”
– Heraclitus
“To be is to be perceived” (“Esse est percipi”)
– Bishop George Berkeley
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination”
– Immanuel Kant
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience”
– John Locke
“Liberty consists in doing what one desires”
– John Stuart Mill
“Even while they teach, men learn”
– Seneca the Younger
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”
– Socrates
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”
– Voltaire
“Leisure is the mother of philosophy”
– Thomas Hobbes
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”
– Aristotle
“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me”
– G. W. F. Hegel
“The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone”
– John Locke
“Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward ”
– Søren Kierkegaard
“Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know”
– Bertrand Russell
“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits”
– William James
“History is Philosophy teaching by examples”
– Thucydides
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”
– Plato
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly”
– Francis Bacon
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Quotes from Famous Philosophers
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”
– Bertrand Russell
“Religion is the sign of the oppressed … it is the opium of the people”
– Karl Marx
“Happiness is the highest good”
– Aristotle
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it”
– Epicurus
“Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable”
– G. W. F. Hegel
“Man is condemned to be free”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth”
– John Locke
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless”
– Plato
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing”
– Socrates
“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”
– Voltaire (in parody of Leibniz)
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”
– Denis Diderot
“Virtue is nothing else than right reason”
– Seneca the Younger
“Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire”
– Epictetus
“In everything, there is a share of everything”
– Anaxagoras
“The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures”
– Democritus
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature”
– John Locke
“Man is the measure of all things”
– Protagoras
“We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone”
– St. Augustine
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