75 Philosophical Questions Quotes
Following is our list of philosophical questions quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
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Famous Philosophical Questions Quotes
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. — Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy begins in wonder. — Plato
the power of philosophy floats through my head.. light like a feather, heavy as lead. — Bob Marley
Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. — Will Durant
Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. — Plato
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. — Thomas Aquinas
Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth. — Albert Pike
I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about. — Arthur C. Clarke
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy. — Bertrand Russell
The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy. — Voltaire
Good questions outrank easy answers. — Paul Samuelson
Good questions outrank easy answers. — Paul A. Samuelson
Nature, philosophy and social issues are the three things that always occupy my mind. You do not have any power over others but can only change yourself. — Pawan Kalyan
Is there a God? Is there an afterlife?... I think that now, more so than ever, people are much more willing to take the time and question what's out there. — Ryan Buell
Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Short Philosophical Questions Quotes
- This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin. — Socrates
- Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. — Janis Joplin
- Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions. — Slavoj Žižek
- The questions that keep us up at night are the questions which drive us during the day. — Isaac Mashman
- The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself. — John Fowles
Philosophical Questions Image Quotes
Existential Questions Quotes
The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. — Randy Pausch
What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come — Samuel Beckett
During our religious instruction in school, we always asked: How can one prove the existence of God? And I have learned that the Catholic Church, which is never at a loss for an answer when it comes to existential questions, responds as follows: This question simply does not arise. — Jean-Claude Juncker
Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that? — Kathryn Schulz
Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers. — Paul Tillich
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules — Albert Camus
People are searching for reasons for believing, searching for answers to the big existential questions of "Why am I here?" and "What is life all about?" I find that people are able to accept the teaching of the Gospel when it's presented to them in both a rational and positive way. — Jonathan Morris
Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them. — Joshua Mohr
Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way. — Frank Moore Cross
A lot of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute struggles are a bit more taken care of, so it allows you to start asking more existential questions like, "What do I want in life? What's going to make me happy?" — Paul Rust
People Writing About Philosophical Questions
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
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Plato |
945 | 13426 |
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Alfred North Whitehead |
327 | 1529 |
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Bob Marley |
297 | 21929 |
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Will Durant |
173 | 1803 |
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Thomas Aquinas |
316 | 4431 |
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Albert Pike |
87 | 783 |
More Philosophical Questions Quotes
Why do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries. — Irwin Corey
What philosopher of the schoolroom, with the mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the beautiful princess, or subtracts a single inch from the stride of seven leagues? — Robert Aris Willmott
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself. — Hans-Georg Gadamer
You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions. — Richard Rorty
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. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question. — Neil Gaiman
I felt the question of the afterlife was the black hole of the personal universe: something for which substantial proof of existence had been offered but which had not yet been explored in the proper way by scientists and philosophers. — Raymond Moody
Life is too short to be wasted in finding answers. Enjoy the questions. — Paulo Coelho
It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too. — Aristotle
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity—and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand. — Richard P. Feynman
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. — Ted Chiang
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. — Isaiah Berlin
I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. — Pete Seeger
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time. — Bill Watterson
Among creatures born into chaos, a majority will imagine an order, a minority will question the order, and the rest will be pronounced insane. — Robert Breault
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love. — Robert Graves
Question: Why are we Masters of our Fate, the captains of our souls? Because we have the power to control our thoughts, our attitudes. That is why many people live in the withering negative world. That is why many people live in the Positive Faith world. And you don't have to be a poet or a philosopher to know which is best. — Alfred Armand Montapert
If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it ... I believe that many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations. — Percy Williams Bridgman
It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one. — Morris Raphael Cohen
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate. — Jacques Derrida
God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence. — Kedar Joshi
The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot. — James Jeans
The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself. — Stokely Carmichael
Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will. — Mark Ravenhill
We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge. — Tariq Ramadan
For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors. — Slavoj Žižek
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. — Arthur Schopenhauer
Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
That's an interesting philosophical question. When your boner goes away, is that one gone... forever? — Adam Carolla
It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions. — Eugene Ionesco
No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it. — Ouida
The fundamental question for the United States is how it can cooperate to help meet the basic needs of the people of the hemisphere despite the philosophical disagreements it may have with the nature of particular regimes. It must seek pragmatic ways to help people without necessarily embracing their governments. It should recognize that diplomatic relations are merely practical conveniences and not measures of moral judgment. — Nelson Rockefeller
My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions. — Slavoj Zizek
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems. — G.W. Allport
The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher's or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself - Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation? — Richard P. Feynman
I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible. — Karl Jaspers
If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak. — Anish Kapoor
I'm not a philosopher so why should I provide anyone with the answers? I'm just a musician, I don't have any solutions. All I'm doing is questioning the status quo, with every record I've made, to a certain extend. — Ayshay
Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over the question of how we know as much as we do despite our limited experiences. One way is to see how children learn. Another example is consciousness. The concept is usually explored by armchair academics. Looking at kids expands our conceptions of consciousness. — Alison Gopnik
Philosophical questions and modes of thought just seem natural to me. They mesh with the way my mind works. — Samuel Scheffler
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