H. L. Mencken Quotes

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

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.

I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy.

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

Philosophy is talk on a cereal box.

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.

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.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

And though the philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.