Some Philosophical Quotations
The following claims illustrate a few of the problems that philosophers address.1 The claims are presented chronologically.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates (c. 470 BCE-399 BCE), Plato, The Apology, 38A.
The wisest is he who realizes, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is worthless.
—Plato, The Apology, 23B.
To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less.
—Plato (c. 428 BCE-347 BCE), Protagorus, 358C.
Intellectual virtue owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.… From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature.… Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them, and are perfected in them through custom.
—Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE), Nicomachean Ethics 1097b.
When we say that pleasure is the goal we do not mean the pleasures of the dissipated and those which consist in the process of enjoyment … but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the mind. For it is not drinking and continuous parties nor sexual pleasures nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a wealthy table which produce the pleasant life, but sober reasoning which searches out the causes of every act of choice and refusal and which banishes the opinions that give rise to the greatest mental confusion.
—Epicurus (341 BCE-270 BCE), “Letter to Menoeceus,” A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 65.
God is not the parent of evils.… Evils exist by the voluntary sin of the soul to which God gave free choice.
—St. Augustine (354-430), Contra Fortunatum Manichaeum, Acta seu Disputatio, Ch. 20.
I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that ‘unless I do believe I shall not understand’ (Isaiah 7: 9).
—St. Anselm (1033-1109), Proslogion, Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, I, 94.
Words are used of God and creatures in an analogical way.
—St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Summa Theologiae, I, Pt. 1, qu. 13, a. 5.
[I]n the mere state of nature, if you have a mind to kill, that state itself affords you a right.
—Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Philosophical Rudiments, English Works, 3, 156.
Accordingly this ‘I’—that is, the soul by which I am what I am—is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist.
—Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, I, 127.
Do not we find that we often desire the Happiness of others without any … selfish Intention?
—Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, s. 431.
The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses, is that of cause and effect; and that because ‘tis the only one, on which we can found a just inference from one object to another.
—David Hume (1711-1776), A Treatise of Human Nature 89.
We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable.
—Hume, Ibid., 93.
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for a time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.
—Hume, ibid., 252.
Next to the ridicule of denying evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.
—Hume, ibid., 176.
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will.
—Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott, 9.
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.
—John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Utilitarianism, 212.
There has been said much that is strange, much that is deplorable, much that is revolting about Christianity; but the most stupid thing ever said about it is that it is to a certain degree true.
—Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie, 205.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed.… In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world…
Karl Marx (1818-1883), “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Marx Engels Werke, 1: 540, trans. A. Wood.
It is easy … to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
—C. S. Peirce (1839-1914), Collected Papers, 4, #237.
We are warned by a proverb against serving two masters at the same time. The poor ego has things even worse: it serves three masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another.… Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.
—Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, 77.
Take the case of questions about the past which are intrinsically unanswerable, at least by any means now at our command. What did Brutus eat for his morning meal the day he assassinated Caesar? There are those who call a statement on such a matter a judgment or proposition in a logical sense. It seems to me that at most it is but an esthetic fancy such as may figure in the pages of a historic novelist who wishes to add realistic detail to his romance.… Only when the past event which is judged is a going concern having effects still directly observable are judgment and knowledge possible.
—John Dewey (1859-1952), The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 42.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Nachlass, ed. K. Schlechta. A. Danto.
We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience.… The ‘particular’ is thus conceived as being just its individual self with no necessary relevance to any other particular.… In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.
—Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Process and Reality, 79.
In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.
—Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Our Knowledge of the External World, 42.
It is only the racist underpinning of the American world-view which allows the US press, the Senate and many public figures to remain absolutely silent when ‘Vietcong’ prisoners are summarily shot; yet at the same time these bodies demand the leveling of North Vietnamese cities if the pilots are brought to trial for their crimes.
—Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam, 1.
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.… there [sic?] is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.… Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself … [sic?]
—Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Existentialism and Humanism, trans. P. Mairet, 28.
The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money’.… I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks.
—J. Ayer (1910-1989), Language, Truth and Logic, 110.
Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all the virtues.
—Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), The Sovereignty of Good, 35.
The original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.… The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
—John Rawls (b. 1921), A Theory of Justice, 136.
It is the proper business of morality … to expand our sympathies, or better, to reduce the liability to damage inherent in their natural tendency to be narrowly restricted.
—G. J. Warnock (b. 1923), The Object of Morality, 26.
A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree.
Judith Jarvis Thomson (b. 1929), ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1971), 48.
The simple theory, though ever seductive, is usually the mistress of error.
—Keith Lehrer (b. 1936), Knowledge and Skepticism, 152.
If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—insofar as comparisons can be made—of any other being.
It is on this basis that the case against racism and the case against sexism must both ultimately rest; and it is in accordance with this principle that the attitude that we may call ‘speciesism’, by analogy with racism, must also be condemned. Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.
—Peter Singer (b. 1946), Animal Liberation, 8, 6.
[J]ohn Locke … argued that we gain a right to property by “mixing our labor” with natural objects, as long as we leave ‘enough and as good’ for others. If I have carved a piece of wood into a chair, tilled the land, or gathered berries, they become mine—provided there is still wood, land, and berries for others to do the same. But why does mixing my labor with something that was not mine make the entire object mine? Might not mixing what is mine with something that is not mine just as easily mean that I lose what is mine? (If I own some salt, and put it into a lake, I don’t make all the water in the lake mine.)
—Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil, 15-16.
1. These statements, and many others, can be found in A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations, edited by A. J. Ayer and Jane O’Grady (Blackwell, 1994).