Quotes of Philosophy

It is a falsification of the facts to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but to say the ‘it’ is just that famous old ‘I’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion…” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche is directly criticizing Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” He argues that Descartes illegitimately inserts a stable “I” as the subject of thinking, when all we actually have is the occurrence of thought itself.

One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. Letter from Sigmund Freud to C. G. Jung (1907)

It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct. Sigmund Freud, Die Verdrängung (repression), (1915) In this quote 'it' refers to a repressed instinctual representative

If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

Whose would be a man must be a nonconformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)

All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness. Immanuel Kant

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living. Voltaire

The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose. Eckhart Tolle

knowledge arises from the interaction of sensory input and the mind’s innate structures. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. Bertrand Russell

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. Hannah Arendt

Reason must be our last judge and guide in every thing. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Stephen Hawking

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws, 1748

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion). The critique of pure reason Immanuel Kant