top of page
Quotes by Philosopher

"Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is."

"The mind is a beautiful servant but a dangerous master."

"You are already whole, you just need to realize it."

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there."

"There is pleasure when a sore is scratched, But to be without sores is more pleasurable still. Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires, But to be without desires is more pleasurable still."

"One bee cannot build a hive, one ant cannot build a colony."


"The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone."


"If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart."

"No one that encounters prosperity does not also encounter danger."

"What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe."

"Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it."

"Don't search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now."

"Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed."

"Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell."

"But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises."


"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."

"Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false."

"Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed."

"To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty."

"Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half."

"We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots."

"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."

"School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan."

"Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?"

"Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete."

"Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil."

"Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words."


"Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect - a process which occurs in every dialectical victory - you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one's own advantage. - Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as "Death before dishonour, and so on."

"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity " I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly."

"Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the Universe."


"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."

"With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine."

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."


"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."

"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."

"She complains that I'm lazy, but I just like to save my energy for dinner."

"The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation."


"I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."
bottom of page