General
To generalize is to be an idiot.
-William Blake
Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.
-Upton Sinclair
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
-Henry David Thoreau
Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.
-Henry David Thoreau
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
-Thomas Jefferson
Man and Life
The general rule is that everyone can get what they want from life. But virtually everyone is an exception to this rule.
-Samuel Butler
A good man: body serves his will and enjoys hard work, clear intellect that understands the truths of nature, full of passion for life but controlled by his will, well-developed conscience, loves beauty in art and nature, despises inferior morality, respects himself and others.
-Thomas Huxley
All the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still.
-Blaise Pascal
Work and love--these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
-Theodor Reik
The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.
-Lilian Smith
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-Henry David Thoreau
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law [for living] which we may obey. A successful life knows no law.
-Henry David Thoreau
The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.
-Confucius
Man and Society
All failures are so because they lack social interest.
-Alfred Adler
If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.
-Yugoslav proverb
He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.
-Aristotle
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
-Bertrand Russell
Beliefs
Man isn't a fool for his ignorance, but rather for believing things that are wrong.
-Josh Billings
Real men don't conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
As man's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.
-Michel de Montaigne
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
-Jose Gasset
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
-Bertrand Russell
Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.
-John Sloan
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
-Henry David Thoreau
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the times.
-Voltaire
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.
-Voltaire
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man and His Image
I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.
-Confucius
When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Marriage
The majority of great men are the offspring of unhappy marriages.
-Hermann von Keyserling
A married philosopher is a comic character.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Love as a relation between men and women was ruined by the desire to make sure of the legitimacy of children.
-Bertrand Russell
Love and Compassion
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
-Bertrand Russell
...if you feel this [love/compassion], you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.
-Bertrand Russell
Once a man recognizes himself as a being surrounded by other beings in this world and begins to respect his life and take it to the highest value, he becomes a thinking being. Then he values other lives and experiences them as part of his own life. With that, his goal is to help everyone take their life to the highest value; anything which limits or destroys a life is evil. That is morality. That is how men are related to the world around them.
-Albert Schweitzer
By having reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep and alive. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.
-Albert Schweitzer
Desire and Hypocrisy
It is false to suggest that men must turn away from his desires in the interest of a higher duty. Men only responds to duty if he desires to do so. To understand men, you must understand their desires and the relative strength of those desires.
-Bertrand Russell
Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.
-Bertrand Russell
Freedom
He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.
-Benedict Spinoza
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bed-ridden; all world-ridden.
-Henry David Thoreau
Freedom is that faculty which enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.
-Immanuel Kant
Art
The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.
-Aristotle
The highest problem of every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the illusion of a loftier reality.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The excellence of every art is its intensity.
-John Keats
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not.
-John Keats
The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from which we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
-Marcel Proust
Truth
Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.
-Henri Amiel
Men don't achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won't criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them.
-Henri Amiel
Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it.
-Conficius
Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Much that we hug today as knowledge is ignorance pure and simple. It makes the mind wander and even reduces it to a vacuity.
-Gandhi
There is no God higher than Truth.
-Gandhi
A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly, little fact.
-Thomas Huxley
The love of truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
-John Locke
For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular.
-H. L. Mencken
The men the American people admire the most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
-H. L. Mencken
Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth.
-Socrates
Truth is always the strongest argument.
-Sophocles
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
-Henry David Thoreau
As a rule people are afraid of truth. Each truth we discover in nature or social life destroys the crutches on which we used to lean.
-Ernst Toller
Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
-Immanuel Kant
Philosophy
The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubts.
-Morris Cohen
My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity--the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter.
-Thomas Huxley
Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.
-Immanuel Kant
A philosophic creed is impossible. The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.
-George Lewes
Men accept without questioning that this world is real and important and worthwhile. This is faith. Philosophy is the ongoing questioning of this faith.
-Josiah Royce
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
-George Santayana
Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.
-Albert Schweitzer
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts...but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
-Henry David Thoreau
Philosophy starts with doubt and loves only truth.
-Henri Amiel