Philosophical Quotes

“It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.”

Rene Descartes

“What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.”
Plato

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”

Mary Wollstonecraft

“...it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but that is not what they care about.”

Aristotle

“There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is contradict other philosophers.”

William James

“There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or the other.”

Rene Descartes

“There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.”
Aristotle

“I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis.  But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).”

Robert Adams

“The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.”

Jose Ortega Y Gassett

“No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusion it may lead.”

John Stuart Mill

"People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them.  Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further.  Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way."

Joseph Butler

“The end of argument or discussion should be, not victory, but enlightenment.”

Joseph Joubert