95 Thought-Provoking Philosophical Quotes

In a world often driven by the fast pace of daily routines and ever-evolving technology, taking a moment to ponder deeper existential questions can be both refreshing and necessary for personal growth. Philosophy, with its timeless quest for wisdom, invites us to reflect on the fundamental nature of our existence, reality, and our place within it. In this blog post, we unveil a carefully curated selection of 95 thought-provoking philosophical quotes that span centuries and continents. These words of wisdom offer new perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and inspire reflection—fueling an inner journey that can lead to profound insights and personal transformation. Dive into these nuggets of philosophical thought and allow them to stimulate your mind and nourish your soul.

1. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

2. “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” - Voltaire

3. “Hope is the privilege of the weak.” - Gasmaskman

4. “It's best to locate the mind first before launching the 'missiles of contention'.” - Gasmaskman

5. “They can send death at once, but life is slower...” - Ursula K. Le Guina K. Le Guin

6. “Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.” - Armando Valladares

7. “Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible ManI am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.” - Ishmael Reed

8. “Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.” - Euripides

9. “That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.” - W.E.H. Lecky

10. “A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches” - Jeff Lindsay

11. “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.” - Ray Bradbury

12. “Where men can't live gods fare no better.” - Cormac McCarthy

13. “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

14. “If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;!” - Rudyard Kipling

15. “I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.” - Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

16. “The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.” - Albert Camus

17. “People are not measured by their accomplishments, but by how many times they screw up trying to achieve them.” - James McGregor

18. “There is such dissociation between what the eyes see and what the mind envisions. The final thought is just a matter of interpretation, coloured by our experiences.” - Anirban Bose

19. “My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church. In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.” - Italo Calvino

20. “It was a train full of strangers, and they were all the same.” - Cherie Priest

21. “With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?” - Pablo Neruda

22. “The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.” - Yann Martel

23. “The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.” - Sebastian Barry

24. “Must this with farce and folly rack myhead unpunish'd ? that with sing-song,Whine me dead?” - Juvenal

25. “That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.” - Euripides

26. “Devils so work that things which are not, appear to men as if they were real.” - Lactantius

27. “For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.” - Moses Maimonides

28. “If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.” - Jules Verne

29. “I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level. ” - Morag Joss

30. “It saddens me beyond my tears that love is lost within the fears.” - Lynn C. Tolson

31. “Don´t count the days. Make the days count.” - ali

32. “I do, I am” - Benny Bellamacina

33. “Life has taught me one supreme lesson. This is that we must—if we are really to live at all, if we are to enjoy the life more abundant promised by the Sages of Wisdom—we must put our convictions into action. My remuneration has been that I have been privileged to act out my faith.” - Margaret Sanger

34. “All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.” - Isaac Asimov

35. “Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change” - Benny Bellamacina

36. “No matter how many plans you make or how much in control you are, life is always winging it.” - Carroll Bryant

37. “Sometimes we choose the road we follow.And sometimes the road chooses us.” - Richie singh

38. “Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.” - Georg Simmel

39. “Aquellos de espíritu superior entienden la justicia. Los ordinarios, el beneficio.” - Confucius

40. “You have to set somebody free for them to return” - Candice Night

41. “The Yorubas have a saying, here, my translation in English--a poor fool is a bigger fool rich. In other words, money only allows and enables you to be more of who you are. My bigger translation? You don't jump essence, you jump environs!” - Dew Platt

42. “Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?” - Confucius

43. “We go to school so that when we grow up we can make lots of money, and we make lots of money so we can provide for our children, and we have children to provide for our retirement (because we don’t have any money left).” - R.M. ArceJaeger

44. “The only working model of socialism I have ever seen is in an elementary school classroom.” - R.M. ArceJaeger

45. “Without a whole lot of pressure, a diamond is just a piece of coal.” - Miriam Darnell

46. “You always look on the dark side of life. I believe in capturing the moment...Joy is so fleeting. You never know when it might be snatched away.” - Susan Wiggs

47. “-Edel, ¿hay algún modo de conseguir hombres que no hagan daño?Eso debe de habérselo preguntado Dios también, en su momento.” - Alessandro Baricco

48. “Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.” - Carroll Bryant

49. “Heated is what you get when you rub faith and instinct together.” - Cornelia DeDona

50. “This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.” - Mitch Albom

51. “Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.” - G.K. Chesterton

52. “Irony is the kid who steals music and is stolen by the music.” - MEDVGNO

53. “There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness” - Sophocles

54. “Years ago, when I was working on my master's thesis, I went to New York for a semester as an exchange student. What struck me most was the sky. On that side of the world, so far away from the North Pole, the sky is flat and gray, a one-dimensional universe. Here, the sky is arched, and there's almost no pollution. In spring and fall the sky is dark blue or violet, and sunsets last for hours. The sun turns into a dim orange ball that transforms clouds into silver-rimmed red and violet towers. In winter, twenty-four hours a day, uncountable stars outline the vaulted ceiling of the great cathedral we live in. Finnish skies are the reason I believe in God.” - James Thompson

55. “Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.” - Thomas Mann

56. “It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.” - Aristotle

57. “Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space.” - Arthur Koestler

58. “Intelligence is being intelligent enough to know you're not so intelligent as you intelligently once thought.” - Carroll Bryant

59. “Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.” - James Baldwin

60. “You know what turns dirt into diamonds?""Pressure. Weight. Heat...""The geological equivalent of torture.” - Laura Argiri

61. “It all begins with goodness in the heart.” - Bjorn Street

62. “Without the quest, there can be no epiphany.” - Constantine E. Scaros

63. “‎"We live in a world where those things that we never imagine could ever do something, did the best.” - Jestoni Revealed

64. “Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.” - Newton Lee

65. “Evil is done by the living.” - Heather Graham

66. “The truth was always out there, you just had to find it.” - Heather Graham

67. “Evil doesn't just go away.” - Heather Graham

68. “Jace turned to look over his shoulder, the wind whipping his hair into tangles. "What are you thinking?" he called back to her."Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.""Everything down there is exactly the same," he said. "You're the one that's different.” - Cassandra Clare

69. “Our physical world seems ready and able to accommodate the needs of the spiritually awakened new Superhuman. The constraints or demands of our material world are not the real problem; it is our own spiritual awareness and philosophical wisdom that is lagging behind.” - Anthon St. Maarten

70. “That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.” - Ayn Rand

71. “Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.” - Victor Hugo

72. “Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.” - Joseph Addison

73. “Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?” - Henry Miller

74. “Death twitches my ear;'Live,' he says... 'I'm coming.” - Virgil

75. “Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.” - Daniel Delgado F

76. “If only yesterday could be my tomorrow then today wouldn't even matter.” - Carroll Bryant

77. “We are all only men, defined by our choices.” - I.E. Castellano

78. “Always take a compliment, even if it’s not yours” - Benny Bellamacina

79. “There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law of following good and shunning evil? Obviously, mankind. But then that is a dangerous thing, for if a man does not believe in a god capable of giving perfect laws, he is in the position of declaring all laws come from man, and as man is imperfect, he can declare that as fallible men make imperfect laws, he can pick and choose what he wishes to follow, that which, in his own mind seems good. He does not believe in divine retribution, therefore he can also declare his own morality contrary to what the divine may decree simply because he believes there is no divine decree. He may follow his every whim and passion, declaring it to be good when it may be very evil, for he like all men is imperfect, so how can he tell what is verily good? The atheist is in danger of mistaking vice for good and consequently follow another slave master and tyrant, his own physical and mental weakness. Evil would be wittingly or unwittingly perpetrated, therefore, to recognise the existence of a perfect divine being that gives perfect Universal Laws is much better than not to believe in a god, for if there is a perfect god, they will not allow their laws to be broken with impunity as in the case with many corrupt judges on earth, but will punish accordingly in due time. Therefore, to be pious and reverent is the surest path to true freedom as a perfect god will give perfect laws to prevent all manner of slavery, tyranny and moral wantonness, even if we do not understand why they are good laws at times.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

80. “You know a person is teaching the truth when no one debates it." ~ Amunhotep El Bey” - Amunhotep El Bey

81. “Only gravity can hold me down; only myself can hold me back.” ~ Amunhotep El Bey” - Amunhotep El Bey

82. “Iron deficiency can lead to a wardrobe full of crumpled clothes” - Benny Bellamacina

83. “The games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.” - Terry Pratchett

84. “Every person writes his own book with the example of his life.” - Casper Silk

85. “If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

86. “... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

87. “Knowing you don't have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out-more like, they figure themselves out-and everything gets real clear.” - Kami Garcia

88. “Do I ever feel like anything?” - Nyrae Dawn

89. “Perhaps it is a good thing that we don't live long enough to realize how redundant things seem :)” - G.E.GRAVES

90. “It is better to burn than to disappear.” - Albert Camus

91. “I have also figured out that for many people death is a difficult subject, not at all as simple as it is for me.” - Maija Haavisto

92. “Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.” - Mark Twain

93. “All these mirrorscarnival distortionsof selves we never were.” - Basith

94. “إذا كان الوضع الذي ساد في عالم الإسلام لترتيب العلاقة بين العقل والنقل; وأعني بالكيفية التي ظل معها العقل تابعا لسلطة النقل علي نحو شبه كامل, هو ما يؤسس لهذا التصور الغالب عن قصور العقل واحتياجه, فإن أصل هذا الوضع لا يرتد- علي عكس ما يتبادر سريعا للذهن- إلي الإسلام نفسه, بل إنه يجد ما يؤسسه كاملا في قلب الثقافة السابقة عليه, والتي يبدو- وللمفارقة- أن الإسلام قد قصد إلي زحزحة وإزاحة نظامها الكلي, علي الرغم من إدماجه لبعض عناصرها الجزئية في صميم بنائه. فإنه إذا كان التحليل يكشف عن أن من قاموا علي صياغة التيار الغالب في ثقافة الإسلام( الذين يتناسلون في سلالة ممتدة من علماء الأصول الكبار من مثل الشافعي وابن حنبل والأشعري والباقلاني والجويني والغزالي وابن تيمية وغيرهم) قد كرسوا تبعية- تتفاوت حدودها- من العقل للنقل, فإنه يبدو- وللغرابة- أن الترتيب الذي كرسه هؤلاء المؤسسون الكبار للعلاقة بين العقل والنقل, يمثل انحرافا عن ترتيب العلاقة بينهما الذي ينبني عليه فعل الوحي ذاته; وهو الفعل المؤسس للإسلام كدين.” - علي مبروك

95. “تدرك السياسة, وخصوصاً حين تكون قامعة مستبدة، أن العقل المنفتح غير المقيد هو أخطر ما يتهددها؛ وذلك من حيث يؤشر علي أن نقيضها من الحكم الرشيد هو المؤدي- وليس سواه- إلي تحقيق صالح المجموع، ومن هنا ما تسعي إليه، علي الدوام، من إزاحته وإبعاده.وإذ تدرك استحالة إنجاز هذا الإنجاز بما تمتلك من وسائل الترويع والبطش، فإنها تتوسل بالدين والشرع لتضعهما في مواجهة معه، وللغرابة، فإن ذلك لا ينتهي إلي إسكات صوت العقل فحسب، بل إلي تهديد منظومتي الدين والشرع علي نحو كامل.” - علي مبروك