Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.
There is no opinion so stupid that it can't be expressed by some philosopher.
When you want to hear a philosopher, do not say, 'You say nothing to me'; only show yourself worthy or fit to hear, and then you will see how you will move the speaker.
Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative.
I'm boring as hell. I just sit around and talk philosophy.
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Philosophy is talk on a cereal box.
Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales
I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won't last long, however. It's more showy than convincing.
Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.
A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
Some people are sure to say that women who spend their time with philosophers are bound to become self-willed and arrogant, deserting their households for the company of [other ] men, practicing speeches, talking like sophists, when they ought to be sat at home spinning
Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.
So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.
Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.
I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.
However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.
