Quotes about philosophy

What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy.

Plato

Philosophy does not claim to secure for us anything outside our control. Otherwise it would be taking on matters that do not concern it. For as wood is the material of the carpenter, and marble that of the sculptor, so the subject matter of the art of life is the life of the self.

Epictetus

But I had little knowledge of Marxism, and in political discussions with my communist friends I found myself handicapped by my ignorance of their philosophy. I decided to remedy this.

Nelson Mandela

Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.

Sydney J. Harris

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

Epictetus

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Bertrand Russell

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

My philosophy and my belief was that there was a long way for us to go in improving what we had ever known before, that this country of ours was a country of constant improvement. And so I thought that, well, what my whole approach was based on the promise of a better America.

Ronald Reagan

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.

Martin Luther King Jr.