Philosophize Quotes & Sayings

When one begins to philosophize one must be first a Spinozist. The soul must bathe itself in the aether of this single substance, in
which everything one has held dear is submerged. — Hegel G W F

Plato ... says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution. — Allan Bloom

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

I am trying not to philosophize. It is un-military. I think I can dig myself out of my academic mind and make an efficient officer. — James Carl Nelson

They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses. — Galileo Galilei

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer - all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? - and so I tell my life to myself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor. — Anton Chekhov

To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun. — Louis Althusser

Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no 'higher' virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize. You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren't just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible. — Jack Donovan

Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. — Lorrie Moore

Nothing of that which is conducive to help man, collectively or individually, to live not "happily" but less unhappily in this world, ought to be indifferent to the Theosophist-Occultist. It is no concern of his whether his help benefits a man in his worldly or spiritual progress; his first duty is to be ever ready to help if he can, without stopping to philosophize. — H. P. Blavatsky

It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize. — Aristotle.

Study is to study what cannot be studied. Undertaking means undertaking what cannot be undertaken. Philosophizing is to philosophize about what cannot be philosophized about. Knowing that knowing is unknowable is true perfection. — Zhuangzi

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world. — Edmund Husserl

The Olympian vice.
In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'
Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter
right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion
and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry. — Anton Chekhov

Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings. — Thomas More

There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a traveling from grave to grave. — Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death. — Michel De Montaigne

I studied philosophy in college and didn't realize until my senior year that no one would pay me to philosophize when I graduated. My frantic search for a "post-graduation plan" led me to law school mostly because other graduate programs required you to know something about your field of study to enroll; law schools, it seemed, didn't require you to know anything. At Harvard, I could study law while pursuing a graduate degree in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, which appealed to me. — Bryan Stevenson

The world exists to let Man philosophize. — Kedar Joshi

Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, "The mountain is, and is not." They would think, "The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana. — Terry Pratchett

He who wishes to explain Generation must take for his theme the organic body and its constituent parts, and philosophize about them; he must show how these parts originated, and how they came to be in that relation in which they stand to each other. But he who learns to know a thing not only from its phenomena, but also its reasons and causes; and who, therefore, not by the phenomena merely, but by these also, is compelled to say: 'The thing must be so, and it cannot be otherwise; it is necessarily of such a character; it must have such qualities; it is impossible for it to possess others' - understands the thing not only historically but truly philosophically, and he has a philosophic knowledge of it. Our own Theory of Generation is to be such a philosphic comprehension of an organic body, a very different one from one merely historical. (1764) — Caspar Friedrich Wolff

Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly ... — Anton Chekhov

A Christian man is on his guard with respect to those who philosophize according to the elements of this world, not according to God, by Whom the world itself was made; for he is warned by the precept of the apostle and faithfully hears what has been said, 'Beware that no one deceive you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the elements of the world' — Saint Augustine

Whether we will philosophize or we won't philosophize, we must philosophize. — Aristotle.

As regards authority I so proceed. Boetius says in the second prologue to his Arithmetic, 'If an inquirer lacks the four parts of mathematics, he has very little ability to discover truth.' And again, 'Without this theory no one can have a correct insight into truth.' And he says also, 'I warn the man who spurns these paths of knowledge that he cannot philosophize correctly.' And Again, 'It is clear that whosoever passes these by, has lost the knowledge of all learning.' — Roger Bacon

When all else fails, philosophize. — J.M. Coetzee

To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize. — Blaise Pascal

Life is arduous without any breaks, like a long journey without any inns. Learned variety makes it pleasant. Spend the first part of a fine life in communication with the dead. We are born to know and to know ourselves, and books reliably turn us into people. Spend the second part with the living: see and examine all that's good in the world. Not everything can be found in one country; the universal Father has shared out his gifts and sometimes endows the ugliest with the most. Let the third stage be spent entirely with yourself: the ultimate happiness, to philosophize. — Baltasar Gracian

We must laugh and philosophize and manage our households and look after our other affairs all at the same time, and never stop proclaiming the words of the true philosophy. — Epicurus

To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs. — Jacques Maritain

[I]f a man bred to the seafaring life, and accustomed to think and talk only of matters relating to navigation, enters into discourse upon any other subject; it is well known, that the language and the notions proper to his own profession are infused into every subject, and all things are measured by the rules of navigation: and if he should take it into his head to philosophize concerning the faculties of the mind, it cannot be doubted, but he would draw his notions from the fabric of the ship, and would find in the mind, sails, masts, rudder, and compass. — Thomas Reid

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. — Rebecca Goldstein

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. — Aristotle.

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Intellectuals ponder, philosophize, interpret, and all this is essential to our shared experience, however, to feel the warmth of what lays at our feet within all that can be felt by the heart, is in an instant more powerful than mere words, we need to feel the words, capture the essence of what we see, and revel in the tastes of nature, and let ourselves allow our hearts to sing out loud, wild, and free. — Mark Donnelly

The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom. — Eric Hoffer

I'm not at my best when I moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it. — Tallulah Bankhead

I'm not made to philosophize, I don't have the heart for it. My heart is more like a machine for making blood to be spilled in a knife fight... — Camilo Jose Cela

If we ought to philosophize
we ought to philosophize, and if we ought not to philosophize
we ought to philosophize ; in either case, therefore, we ought
to philosophize. For if philosophy exists we ought certainly
to philosophize, because philosophy exists ; and if it does not
exist, even so we ought to examine why it does not exist,
and in examining this we shall be philosophizing, because
examination is what makes philosophy. — Aristotle.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid. — Bertrand Russell

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed. — Karl Jaspers

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life? — Alfred Kazin

Those that can, philosophize. Those who can't, do. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton. — Philip Kitcher

To philosophize is to doubt. — Michel De Montaigne

To philosophize is to learn to die. — Michel De Montaigne

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it. — Mario Puzo

To philosophize means to make vivid. — Novalis

Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views. — Robert Graves

But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: 'how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner.' And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared vituals [sic], he would have written more. — Juana Ines De La Cruz

Faith means that I deliberately shut myself down to this Book, the Bible. I refuse to philosophize. I refuse to ask certain questions. People are always asking them. They want to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. You cannot. You will never understand it. It is too great. So you accept it; and you stop asking questions. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Man first begins to philosophize when the necessities of life are supplied. — Aristotle.

There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. — Carl Sagan

A tyrant remains a tyrant no matter how benevolently he may philosophize and smile, — David I. Kertzer

I don't consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first. — Tahereh Mafi

I like simple things well-done and have no time to philosophize. — George R R Martin

DUE TO OUR FEELINGS ARISING FROM CONTACT, we think and we rationalize, conceptualize, theorize, philosophize and speculate. Because of the feeling arising from the six senses, we increase our desire; we come to wrong views and wrong beliefs. We recall our past sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touches and ideas and build up more desires, thoughts, concepts, beliefs, ideas, theories and philosophies. — Henepola Gunaratana

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize. — Robert M. Pirsig

Zoological taxonomists in general are inclined to be practical workers rather than philosophers, if only because they face such an unending task that they are not encouraged to sit back and philosophize. — Richard E. Blackwelder

Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize ... — Rohinton Mistry

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too. — Aristotle.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. . . .

--From The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912). — Bertrand Russell

They are all very serious people with stern expressions on their faces. They discuss nothing but important matters and like to philosophize a great deal, while at the same time everyone can see that the workers are detestably fed, sleep without suitable bedding, thirty to forty in a room with bedbugs everywhere, the stench, the dampness, and the moral corruption ... Obviously all our fine talk has gone on simply to hoodwink ourselves and other people as well. Show me the day nurseries that they're talking about so much about. And where are the libraries? Why, they just write about nurseries and libraries in novels, while in fact not a single one even exists. What does exist is nothing but dirt, vulgarity, and a barbarian way of life ... I dislike these terribly serious faces, they frighten me, and I'm afraid of serious conversations, too. We'd be better off if we all would just shut up for a while! — Anton Chekhov

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it. — Vincent Van Gogh

And then you grew up, went to school, and began to 'philosophize,' didn't you? We all go through the same thing. It seems that during adolescence a person's inner life is suddenly weakened, stripped of its natural courage. In his thinking he no longer dares stand face to face with reality or mystery; he begins to see them through the opinions of 'grown-ups,' through books and courses and professors. Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often - every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine. The voice cries out its great questioning of everything, but we stifle it again right away. — Rene Daumal

The amount of dissension rises geometrically with the more issues you have to philosophize over. — Alan C. Greenberg

One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper. — Juana Ines De La Cruz

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize. — Blaise Pascal

It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize. — W. H. Auden