Philosopher Quotes on Life

“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

“Hope is the dream of a waking man.”

p. 187

Attributed to Aristotle:

“The good for man is an activity of the soul in conformity with virtue.”

Attributed to Aristotle:

“The end of labour is to gain leisure.”

Attributed to Aristotle:

“Happiness is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.”

“I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.”

Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, cited in Karl Jaspers , Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46

Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

The universe is flux, life is opinion.

Attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

“Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness — all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil.”

Attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

Attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, and do so with all your heart.”

Attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds.

“It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?”

Journal entry, August 1, 1835

“Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for.”

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Original French: La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. | Variant translation: The fight itself towards the summits suffices to fill a heart of man; it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

O light ! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer .

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.”

Original French: La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. | Variant translation: The fight itself towards the summits suffices to fill a heart of man; it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy.

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

Notebooks 1935-1942

“I rebel; therefore we exist.”

The Rebel (L'Homme Revolte), 1951

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”

As attributed in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 624

“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.”

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

Jede Trennung gibt einen Vorgeschmack des Todes und jedes Wiedersehen einen Vorgeschmack der Auferstehung.

Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer:

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.”

Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer:

“After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

What I Believe, 1925

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

Marriage and Morals, 1929

“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”

Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.

“I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”

Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.

Attributed to Bertrand Russell:

“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.”

Attributed to Epicurus:

“Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.”

Attributed to Epicurus:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”

Attributed to Epicurus:

“Live in obscurity.”

Attributed to Epicurus:

“Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated.”

Attributed to Epicurus:

“It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

p. 10

“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

p. 18

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

p. 364 | Commonly misquoted, converted to imperative mood, as "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler".

“But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place.”

Sic Vita", st. 6. The Dial (July 1841) p. 82

“The life that I aspire to live No man proposeth me— No trade upon the street Wears its emblazonry.”

The Black Knight", l. 11. The Dial (October 1842) p. 180

“Hell is other people.”

Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres.

“Existence precedes essence.”

L'existence précède et commande l'essence.

“Man is condemned to be free.”

Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

Nausea, 1938

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

p. 41

“Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”

Letter on Humanism (1947)

“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.”

Stambaugh translation

Attributed to Martin Heidegger:

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”

Attributed to Martin Heidegger:

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.”

Attributed to Martin Heidegger:

“Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety.”

“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”

Letters to Lucilius, 1

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”

Aliquando enim et vivere fortiter facere est

Attributed to Seneca the Younger:

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable.”

Attributed to Seneca the Younger:

“Our care should not be to have lived long, but to have lived enough.”

Attributed to Seneca the Younger:

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”

“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

“Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?”

Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean'

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James , vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James , vol. I, p. 147.

Attributed to William James:

“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”

“To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”

Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17

“Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17”

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea . And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul , for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone .”

A Writer's Diary , Vol. 1: 1873-1876 , ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734

Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“Beauty will save the world.”

Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

“The universe is a machine for the making of gods.”

Concluding sentences ; often just the last part of the last sentence is quoted, in the form: "The universe is a machine for making gods.

“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant , man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity , in space and in time , is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death .”

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“Intelligence is characterised by a natural incomprehension of life.”

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”

Ch. 2; as translated by James Strachey , p.63

“Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”

Ch. 10

“Princess, my little Princess, Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today.”

Letter to Martha Bernays, after receiving a travel grant he had been having dreams of receiving (20 June 1885). The final line is the German equivalent of "and they lived happily ever after," as a conventional ending for fairy tales.

“A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller 's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.”

Ein Mensch wie ich kann ohne Steckenpferd, ohne herrschende Leidenschaften, ohne einen Tyrannen in Schillers Worten, nicht leben. Ich habe meinen Tyrannen gefunden und in seinem Dienst kenne ich kein Maß. | Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (1895), as quoted in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol 3-4 (1967) p. 159

Attributed to Sigmund Freud:

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

“Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise.”

Wikiquote

“the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope.”

Wikiquote

Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:

“Being and having are the two fundamental categories of existence.”

Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:

“Hope is for the soul what breath is for the body.”

Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:

“I hope in thee for us.”

“I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”

Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.

“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.”

Original: " La vida no puede esperar a que las ciencias expliquen científicamente el Universo . No se puede vivir ad kalendas graecas . El atributo más esencial de la existencia es su perentoriedad: la vida es siempre urgente. Se vive aquí y ahora sin posible demora ni traspaso. La vida nos es disparada a quemarropa. Ya la cultura, que no es sino su interpretación, no puede tampoco esperar. | Miss

“Life is fired at us point blank.”

More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim. | Man and People [ El hombre y la gente ] (1957), p. 42, translated by Willard R. Trask. IS

“More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim.”

Life is fired at us point blank.

Attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset:

“Civilization is, before all else, the will to live in common.”

“Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living.”

trans. Michael Chase, p. 272

“Incommensurable; but also inseparable. No discourse worthy of being called philosophical, that is separated from the philosophical life; no philosophical life, if it is not strictly linked to philosophical discourse. It is there that the danger inherent to a philosophical life resides: the ambiguity of philosophical discourse.”

Incommensurables donc, mais aussi inséparables. Pas de discours qui mérite d’être appelé philosophique, s’il est séparé de la vie philosophique, pas de vie philosophique, si elle n’est étroitement liée au discours philosophique. C’est là d’ailleurs que réside le danger inhérent à la vie philosophique: l’ambiguïté du discours philosophique.

“If these experiences [of union with the Absolute] are rare, nonetheless they lend their fundamental tonality to the Plotinian way of life, for that way of life appears to us now as a waiting for the unforseeable surging-forth of these privileged moments which give their full sense to life”

Si ces expériences sont rares, elles n’en donnent pas moins sa tonalité fondamentale au mode de vie plotinien, puisque celui-ci nous apparaît maintenant comme l’attente du surgissement imprévisible de ces moments privilégiés qui donnent tout leur sens à la vie.

Attributed to Pierre Hadot:

“Philosophy in antiquity was a way of life.”

Attributed to Pierre Hadot:

“We must learn to live the present, but the present is everything.”

“There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, with their own individual lives.”

Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32

“The Examined Life (1989)”

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato 's Republic , front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

“Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.”

The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181

Attributed to Robert Nozick:

“Plug into an experience machine and you will not have lived a real life.”

Attributed to Robert Nozick:

“Philosophy is not just doctrine; it is a way of living.”

“May any spiritual energy thus generated By my devotion to the enlightened ones Be dedicated to dispelling the misery Of living beings without exception.”

Wikiquote

“As long as diseases afflict living beings May I be the doctor, the medicine And also the nurse Who restores them to health.”

Wikiquote

“May I fall as rain to increase The harvests that must feed living beings And in ages of dire famine May I myself serve as food and drink.”

Wikiquote

Attributed to Shantideva:

“If a problem can be solved, what is the use of worrying? If it cannot be solved, what is the use of worrying?”

Attributed to Shantideva:

“May I become a protector for those without protection, a guide for travelers on the way.”

“Arise, awake, and stop not until the goal is reached.”

Public Addresses

“And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.”

Swami Vivekananda Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

“A perfect life is a contradiction in terms.”

Swâmi Vivekânanda on Râja Yoga (1899), Ch. VI : Pratyâhâra and Dhâraṇâ

Attributed to Swami Vivekananda:

“We are what our thoughts have made us.”

Attributed to Swami Vivekananda:

“Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, live on that idea.”

“Work alone is noble.”

Bk. III, ch. 4.

“My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 .”

Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls.

“The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.”

The life of Friedrich Schiller : Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).

“The life of Friedrich Schiller : Comprehending an examination of his works (1825).”

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

“It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts .”

Letter to His Wife (1835).

“Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

No Religion is an Island", p. 264

“The Meaning of Jewish Existence" in The Torch (1950)”

The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd , a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinit

“Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 24 : The Great Yearning; The Yearning for Spiritual Living”

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love , knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light . The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteri

“The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now .”

Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 26 : The Pious Man; Our Destiny is to Aid

“We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.”

Man's Quest For God : Studies In Prayer And Symbolism (1954), p. 7; Heschel would later use this analogy in several minor variations in other writings.

“The best physician is also a philosopher.”

Quod optimus medicus sit quoque philosophus.

Attributed to Galen:

“He cures most successfully who is most trusted.”

Attributed to Galen:

“Confidence and hope do more good than physic.”

Attributed to Galen:

“Use, do not abuse: neither abstinence nor excess gives happiness.”

Attributed to Galen:

“Medicine without philosophy is blind, philosophy without medicine empty.”