Philosophy quotes

Philosophy is the discipline of taking questions seriously. From the Stoics to the phenomenologists, philosophers have given language to problems everyone wrestles with: how to live, what is worth wanting, what we owe each other. The quotes below are the compact versions — the lines that distill a lifetime of argument into a sentence you can actually remember when it counts. They are useful precisely because they are short enough to carry. Read them slowly. The best philosophy quotes are not answers but invitations to keep thinking.

• Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.

  Brene Brown · Rising Strong

• Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

  Rumi

• One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

  Albert Camus · The Myth of Sisyphus

• It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

  John Locke · An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• Common sense is not so common.

  Voltaire · Dictionnaire Philosophique

• No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

  John Locke · An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.

  Michel de Montaigne · Essays

• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

  Voltaire

• There is nothing permanent except change.

  Heraclitus

• The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

  Carl Jung

• Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

  Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

• It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

  Epictetus · Discourses

• Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

  Jean-Paul Sartre · Being and Nothingness

• We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

  Anais Nin · Seduction of the Minotaur

• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

  Maya Angelou

• If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

  Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

• The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

  Michel de Montaigne · Essays

• The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

  Henry David Thoreau · Walden

• The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

  Chinese Proverb

• Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

  Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

• What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.

  Confucius · Analects

• No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

  Heraclitus

• One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

  Simone de Beauvoir · The Second Sex

• He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

  Seneca · Letters to Lucilius

• You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

  Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

• And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

• All that is gold does not glitter, nor all those who wander are lost.

  Thomas Aquinas

• He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

  Friedrich Nietzsche · Twilight of the Idols

• An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

  Benjamin Franklin · The Way to Wealth

• He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors.

  Martin Heidegger

• Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.

  Carl Jung · On the Psychology of the Unconscious

• Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

  Viktor Frankl · Man's Search for Meaning

• Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

  Rumi

• When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

  Viktor Frankl · Man's Search for Meaning

• The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

• Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our freedom and power to choose our response.

  Viktor Frankl · Man's Search for Meaning

• The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

  Albert Camus · The Rebel

• The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

  Karl Marx · Theses on Feuerbach

• It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

  Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

• I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

  Socrates