Philosophy asks the simple question: what is it all about?
Philosophy - Philosophers Quotes
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance.
There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it. (Marquis of Halifax)
A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
I’ve developed a new philosophy… I only dread one day at a time. (“Peanuts”)
