"Philosopher Quotations:"

Francis Bacon 

''For knowledge is itself power.'' 

[Of Herecies]
Jeremy Bentham 

''The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.'' 

[Works]
George Berkeley 

''All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.'' 


[Principles of Human Knowledge]
Edmund Burke 

''The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'' 

[Attributed]
Confucius 

''What you do not wish others should do unto you, do not do unto them.'' 

[Works of Confucius]
Heraclitus 

''Everything flows and nothing stays.'' 

[Quoted in Plato's Cratylus]
Thomas Hobbes 

''No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'' 

[Leviathan]
David Hume 

'''Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.'' 

[A Treatise on Human Nature]
Immanuel Kant 

''There is...only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law'' 

[Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]
Immanuel Kant 

''So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.'' 

[Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics]
Niccolo Machiavelli 

''It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate.'' 

[The Prince]
Karl Marx 

''Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.'' 

[A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right]
Isaac Newton 

''If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.'' 

[Letter to Robert Hooke]
Friedrich Nietzsche 

''Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality - in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality besides which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible.'' 

[Beyond Good and Evil]
William of Occam 

''Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.'' 

[Quodlibeta Septem]
Blaise Pascal 

''The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.'' 

[Pensees]
Plato 

''We agree that what is holy is loved by the Gods because it is holy, and not holy because it is loved by the gods.'' 

[Euthyphro]
Protagoras of Adera 

''Man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are; of those which are not, that they are not.'' 

[Quoted in Plato's Theaetetus]
George Santayana 

''Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' 

[Reason in Common Sense]
Adam Smith 

''It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.'' 

[The Wealth of Nations]
Socrates 

''The unexamined life is not worth living.'' 

[Apology (Plato)]
Benedict Spinoza 

''Nature abhors a vacuum.'' 

[Ethics]
Thales Miletus 

''Know thyself.'' 

[Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers]
Francois Voltaire 

''I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' 

[Attributed to Voltaire]
Ludwig Wittgenstein 

''What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'' 

[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] 
And now, let us celebrate human faculty to arrive at different understandings and thus complete each other.
gratefully yours, frat.ko 
Saint Anselm 

''For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this I believe -- that unless I believe, I should not understand.'' 

[Proslogion I]
Francis Bacon 

''If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.'' 

[Advancement of Learning]
George Berkeley 

''I have no reason for believing the existence of matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither can I immediately, from any sensations, ideas, notions, actions or passions infer an unthinking, unperceiving, inactive substance - either by probable deduction or necessary consequence.'' 

[Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous]
Rene Descartes 

''If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.'' 

[Discourse on Method]
Rene Descartes 

''But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.'' 

[Discourse on Method]
Epictetus 

''Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.'' 

[Discourses]
Carl Hempel 

''The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as 'All bachelors are unmarried,' but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty: The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.'' 

[On the Nature of Mathematical Truth]
Edmund Husserl 

''Universal doubt cancels itself.'' 

[The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology]
Thomas Huxley 

''I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything.'' 

[Life and Letters]
William James 

''Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?'' 

[The Will to Believe]
Saul Kripke 

''Proper names are rigid designators.'' 

[Naming and Necessity]
Gottfried Leibnitz 

''There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contigent and their opposites are possible.'' 

[Monadology]
John Locke 

''No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.'' 

[Essay Concerning Human Understanding]
Karl Popper 

''The theory of knowledge which I wish to propose is a largely Darwinian theory of the growth of knowledge. From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions.'' 

[Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary approach]
Richard Rorty 

''Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: 'true for me but not for you' and 'true in my culture but not in yours' are weird, pointless locutions. So is 'true then but not now.''' 

[Truth and Progress]
Bertrand Russell 

''I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.'' 

[On the Value of Scepticism]
Alfred Tarski 

''The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white.'' 

[The Semantic Conception of Truth]