Philosophers Quotes
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Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.
Francis Bacon
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Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it's fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
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Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That's why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers.
Charles Marion Russell
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Summer weather, like being in love,is a philosopher's stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day ... For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.
Nan Fairbrother
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It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.
Antonio Machado
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Meditation is a gift confined to unknown philosophers and cows. Others don't begin to think till they begin to talk or write.
Finley Peter Dunne
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Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The code of Manu differs from the bible. By means of it the nobles, the philosophers, and the warriors keep the whip hand over the majority. It is full of noble valuations; it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.
Epictetus
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If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?
Galileo Galilei
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Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race.
Plato
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In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters.
Kenko Yoshida
