Some of My Favorite
Philosophical Quotes

Philosophy & Its Methods

"My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power -- are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?"
- Plato, Apology (F.J. Church translation)

"And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious."
- David Hume, Treatise (1739-40) , Introduction

"Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may every where else hope for an easy victory. From this station we may extend our conquests over all those sciences, which more intimately concern human life, and may afterwards proceed at leisure to discover more fully those, which are the objects of pure curiosity. (...) In pretending, therefore, to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security."
- David Hume, Treatise (1739-40), Introduction

"No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. ...[but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs...." - Fodor (Concepts, 1998, pp. 86-7)

"Philosophy attempts, not to discover new truths about the world, but to gain a clear view of what we already know and believe about it. That depends upon attaining a more explicit grasp of the structure of our thoughts; and that in turn on discovering how to give a systematic account of the working of language, the medium in which we express our thoughts."
- Michael Dummett (from Steve Pyke site)

"...it is absurd to try to confine our knowledge and belief to matters which are conclusively established by sound deductive arguments. The demand for certainty will inevitably be disappointed, leaving skepticism in command of almost every issue."
- J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, p. 7

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
- Voltaire

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A main cause of philosophical disease---an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example."
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remark #593

"I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions."
- Anthony Appiah (from Steve Pyke site)

"Philosophy is about possibilities: logical, metaphysical, human, social, and political possibilities. That's why philosophy is so abstract: it keeps its distance from the world. That's also why philosophy is a tool of criticism: it focuses our attention on ways the world might be. Philosophy's focus on the possible is the source of its distinctive beauty, and also its special dangers."
- Joshua Cohen (from Steve Pyke site)

"You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more."
- Phillipa Foot (from Steve Pyke site)

"When any opinion leads us into absurdities, 'tis certainly false; but 'tis not certain an opinion is false, because 'tis of dangerous consequence."
- Hume, Treatise (1739-40) 2.3.2.3

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
- John Cage

"...while there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics...."
- Hilary Putnam, "Was Wittgenstein Really an Anti-Realist about Mathematics?" (2001), pp. 185-6.

"If I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say, 'This is simply what I do'."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remark #217.

"Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following attack a certain familiar picture of facts and truth, which I shall formulate like this. A genuine fact must be a matter of the way things are in themselves, utterly independent of us. So a genuinely true judgment must be, at least potentially, an exercise of pure thought; if human nature is necessarily implicated in the very formation of the judgment, that precludes our thinking of the corresponding fact as properly independent of us, and hence as a proper fact at all."
- John McDowell, "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule" (1984), p. 351.

"The right response to the claim that all our assessments of truth are made from the standpoint of a 'conceptual system' that is inescapably our own is not to despair of our grip on reality but to say with Hilary Putnam, 'Well?  We should use someone else's conceptual system?'"
- John McDowell, "Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World" in Mind, Value, and Reality (1998), p. 128.

Religion

...when we look beyond human affairs and the properties of the surrounding bodies: when we carry our speculations into the two eternities, before and after the present state of things; into the creation and formation of the universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operations of one universal Spirit existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: ...we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties. So long as we confine our speculations to trade, or morals, or politics, or criticism, we make appeals, every moment, to common sense and experience, which strengthen our philosophical conclusions, and remove, at least in part, the suspicion which we so justly entertain with regard to every reasoning that is very subtile and refined. But, in theological reasonings, we have not this advantage; while, at the same time, we are employed upon objects, which, we must be sensible, are too large for our grasp.... We are like foreigners in a strange country, to whom every thing must seem suspicious, and who are in danger every moment of transgressing against the laws and customs of the people with whom they live and converse. We know not how far we ought to trust our vulgar methods of reasoning in such a subject; since, even in common life, and in that province which is peculiarly appropriated to them, we cannot account for them, and are entirely guided by a kind of instinct or necessity in employing them.
- Philo, from David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part I

"Most people think great god will come from the sky, take away everything, and make everybody feel high. But if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on Earth."
- Bob Marley,"Get Up, Stand Up"

"A man who says 'If God is dead, nothing matters,' is a spoilt child who has never looked at his fellowman with compassion."
- Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God (1990)

'We know we must die; we would rather not, but why must we suffer angst, engage in theatrics, and create myths for ourselves? Why not simply face it and get on with the living of our lives?'
- Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God (1990)

"Hence our verdict on these reformulated versions of St. Anselm's argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion."
- Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (1974), p. 221

"The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours."
- Bertrand Russell, "Do We Survive Death?" in Why I am Not a Christian (1967), p. 92.

Homer: Hey, I got a question for you. (pulls out a piece of paper) "Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?"
Ned: Well sir, of course, he could, but then again... wow, as melon-scratchers go that's a honey-doodle.
Homer: Now you know what I've been going through.
- The Simpsons, "Weekend At Burnsies" (S13E16)

"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. ... If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. ... If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"
- Epicurus

"The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"?"
- Sam Harris

"Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think---though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one---that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell."
- Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)

"We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow."
- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007)

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.
- (not sure of the author)

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004), p. 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water."
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), p. 127.

"Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being."
- Matt McCormick

"One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true."
- Matt McCormick

"I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason."
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk. 4, Ch. 18, Sec. 2.

Ethics

"I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology."
- Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 3.

"To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe."
- Thomas Nagel, "The Fragmentation of Value," in Mortal Questions (1979), p. 135.

"The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods."
- Plato, Euthyphro

Mind and Psychology

"...one can hardly deny that mankind has a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another."
- Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference" (1892)

"It is possible, of course, to operate with figures mechanically, just as it is possible to speak like a parrot: but that hardly deserves the names of thought. It only becomes possible at all after the mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak."
- Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)

"Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so—why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remark #390

"'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant---so that he constantly called different things by that name---but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'---in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remark #271.

"I believe every word that man just said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear."
- Space Ghost, SGC2C, "Chambraigne" [YouTube link]

"You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.'"
- Ned Block, "Troubles with Functionalism" (1980)

"We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.
- John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), p. 304

"...one can never fully disentangle questions about the nature of representation from questions about the nature of what is represented. We can describe and think about the world only with the materials we find in it."
- Robert Stalnaker (from Steve Pyke site)

"...monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interesting about monetary exchanges is surely not their commonalities under physical description. A natural kind like a monetary exchange could turn out to be co-extensive with a physical natural kind; but if it did, that would be an accident on a cosmic scale."
- Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences" (1974), pp. 103-4.

"...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds."
- Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences" (1974), p. 113

"We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: 'I will that the sun shall rise'; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says: 'I will that it shall roll'; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: 'here I lie, but I will lie here!' But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression 'I will'?
- Nietzsche, Daybreak, sec. 124.

"A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible."
- Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 34.

"I do not see why the axiom of Prudence should not be questioned, when it conflicts with present inclination, on a ground similar to that on which Egoists refuse to admit the axiom of Rational Benevolence. If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, 'Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?' it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist 'Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?'"
- Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874), p. 418.

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner."
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.1

"The most obvious objection to the selfish hypothesis is, that, as it is contrary to common feeling and our most unprejudiced notions, there is required the highest stretch of philosophy to establish so extraordinary a paradox. To the most careless observer there appear to be such dispositions as benevolence and generosity; such affections as love, friendship, compassion, gratitude. These sentiments have their causes, effects, objects, and operations, marked by common language and observation, and plainly distinguished from those of the selfish passions. And as this is the obvious appearance of things, it must be admitted, till some hypothesis be discovered, which by penetrating deeper into human nature, may prove the former affections to be nothing but modifications of the latter. All attempts of this kind have hitherto proved fruitless, and seem to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy."
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Appendix 2, "Of Self-Love".

"A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will."
- Thomas Nagel, "Moral Luck," in Mortal Questions (1979), p. 32.

Language

"Make the following experiment: say "It's cold in here" and mean "It's warm in here". Can you do it?
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remark #510

"Now if the sense of a name was something subjective, then the sense of the proposition in which the name occurs, and hence the thought, would also be something subjective, and the thought one man connects with this proposition would be different from the thought another man connects with it; a common store of thoughts, a common science would be impossible. It would be impossible for something one man said to contradict what another man said, because the two would not express the same thought at all, but each his own."
- Gottlob Frege, "Letter to Jourdain" (1914)

Homer watching TV...
Chief: You're off the case, McGarnagle!
McGarnagle: You're off your case, chief.
Chief: What does that mean, exactly?
"It means he gets results, you stupid chief!"
- Homer J. Simpson, The Simpsons (S05E07) [YouTube link]

"Now, when you say "Bob Costas," what do you mean by that? (Bob: You know... uh... it's something I haven't given much thought to...) Well, I have. It's your name, Bob.
- Space Ghost, SGC2C, "Chambraigne" [YouTube link]

Other

"'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true."
- Quine, "On What There Is"

"95% of success is just showing up."
- Woody Allen?

Humor

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch. 9

"Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care."
- Terry Pratchett

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
- Terry Pratchett, Discworld

"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head."
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather", footnote

"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
- Terry Pratchett

"...and as for your grandma, she shouldn't have mouthed off like that."
- Homer J. Simpson, The Simpsons, "Homer the Vigilante" (S05E11)

"Ooh, sounds delish! Let me just toss some jeans on and --- wait a minute! Who is this?"
- Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons, "Marge on the Lam" (S05E06)

"I don't need intelligent drugs, Thom, because I don't know what they are. Okay, Thom? But, I will put anything into my mouth that is given to me, whether it's supposed to go there or not. Because... I'm different. Is that clear with everyone?"
- Space Ghost, SGC2C, "Knifin' Around" [YouTube link]

"Marriage is about hiding in the kudzu behind your apartment and not going in until the lights are completely out."
- Space Ghost, SGC2C, "Knifin' Around" [YouTube link]

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
- Groucho Marx

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it."
- Groucho Marx

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
- Groucho Marx