Philosophy Quotes

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Goodhart

"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment" — Carl Friedrich Gauss

“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name smells just the same” - Shakespeare

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” - Buddha

"Hard work guarantes you nothing, but laziness assures failure." - Ramez Naam

"When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history." - Sea of Poppies

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe" - Gustave Flaubert

"I never trust someone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at" - xkcd

"Living an ethical life means we strive to thwart our baser instincts — those that cause harm and injury to others — and to cultivate those behaviors and attitudes that promote the well-being of ourselves and others.” - Ashley Capps

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Man is the measure of all things" - Protagoras

"An unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates

"An idea is an eternally existing pattern of which individual things in any class are imperfect copies." - Plato

"A joke only lasts for a moment, if it leaves a misunderstanding, it becomes a lie." - Satoshi Fukube

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth" - Albert Einstein

"The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." - Albert Einstein

“I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.”
— Albert Einstein (1932), “My Credo”

"The only way to actually change someone's mind is [to] be very clear that you understand what the alternate point is. Articulate it as intelligently as you can, not as a strawman." - Grant Sanderson

"Life is a journey, not a destination." - not Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Intuitions represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend" - Sherlock Holmes

"I call myself an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this." - Richard Feynman

"Words about words, it was the kind of "knowledge" I despise the most" - Feynman

"I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member" - Groucho Marx

"If everyone's a superhero, no one is" - Syndrome

"If you want to put the holes in your knowledge on display, try teaching someone." - Alan Cox

"When humans are faced with truly terrifying circumstances, they don't think about other people around them. They're even willing to sacrifice those around themselves. By exposing that unsightly part of them, they can no longer get along." - Hachiman Hikigaya

"It is better to be hated for what you are. Than to be loved for what you are not." - Hachiman Hikigaya

"Sometimes, it is cruel to remember" - Princess Xia                                          "However, it is crueler to forget things what one doesn’t want to forget." - Zuo Mo

"Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" - Arthur Schopenhauer

"A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what a ship was built for" -  William H. Shedd

Pride and submissiveness/meekness
Envy and selfless compersion
Wrath and forgiving/pacifism
Glutton and someone on an anorexic diet
Lust and abstinence/castration
Greed and sacrificial generosity

"Of these three dispositions, then, two are vices - one of excess, the other of deficiency and the third, the mean, is a virtue."  - Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II: 1108b10-15

"An ugliness that does not disgust is fundamental to humour." - Aristotle, Poetics (1449a, pp. 34–35)

"We remember what we understand; we understand only what we pay attention to; we pay attention to what we want." - Edward Bolles

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Henry Thomas Buckle

"We are punished by our sins, not for them." - Elbert Hubbard

"One is willing to die in the evening if the truth could be heard in the morning" - Confucius

"Fear is not evil. It tells you what weakness is. And once you know your weakness, you can become stronger as well as kinder." - Gildarts Clive

"Those who forgive themselves, and are able to accept their true nature... They are the strong ones!" - Itachi Uchiha

"Moving on doesn't mean you forget about things. It just means you have to accept what's happened and continue living." - Erza Scarlet

Rather than asking "What do you want out of life?” it is better to ask yourself "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" Because we tend to idealize our dream jobs we fail to see the problems that accompany practicing it in real life. - Mark Manson


"Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully." - Phillips Brooks

"The limits of tolerance for a tolerant society is to be intolerant of intolerant actions" - Karl Popper

“In general I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed, immutable characteristic and shift towards the seeing "being good' as a practice. And it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections.” - Jay Smooth

"Miracles are illusions caused by insufficient observation and understanding. They're just... glorious misunderstandings." - Tanya Degurechaff

“What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.” - Brené Brown

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." EB White

"Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." - E.B. White

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Goodhart

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

"The same people who are judging you, are the same people who consume your product - Porn." - Hot Girls Wanted

Jordan Peterson

"In order to be able to think, you need to risk being offensive." - Jordan Peterson

"We do not know the degree to which sexual proclivity, gender identity, biological sex, gender expression are biologically predicated and socio-culturally instantiated." - J. P.

"Rights don't give meaning to your life, Responsibilities do." - J. P.

“If you want to get better, you have to find out what you’re avoiding and what you’re afraid of. Maybe what you’re disgusted by. You have to expose yourself to that voluntarily, and you have to let that change you. It’s not a pleasant process. It’s a voluntary confrontation of things that make up life’s horrors.” -  J. P.

"The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten." - J. P.

"Ideology is like a crippled religion" - J. P.

"Our capacity to think is embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions and shaped by our motivations and body"  - J. P.

"Don't protect your kid at the cost of the kid's opportunity to protect herself" - J. P.

“Your positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence that
you’re moving towards something that you value” - J. P.

"People depend on their group identity, they believe in things to fill in the gaps, these serve to protect them from the uncertainty of the infinite chaos. Thus we are willing to go to terrible extents in order to protect these beliefs." - J. P.

"Life is difficult and you cannot protect your children forever, what you can do is prepare them" - J. P.

"We don't seek happiness, we seek meaning deep enough to sustain us through tragedy" - J. P.

"Atheist types act out a religious structure and then criticise it." - J. P.

"Our minds are organized verbally, using language at the highest and most abstract levels." - J. P.

"You need a hierarchy of values. Else you can't act or are painfully confused" - J. P.

"Women don't select for men with resources, they select for predictors of resources" - J. P.

"Nietzsche pointed out that most morality is cowardice. There’s absolutely no doubt that that is the case. The problem with ‘nice people’ is that they’ve never been in any situation that would turn them into the monsters they’re capable of being.” - J. P.

"Money is a bargain you make with the future. You can negotiate with the future, taking it seriously, treat it as a reality. Give up the present as a sacrifice." - J. P.

"Reality is an interaction between what we perceive of as a material substrate and consciousness itself." - J. P.

"Functionally the highest moral principle serves as the individual's personal God said Carl Jung" - J. P.

"Self understanding is the conscious mapping of implicit value structures (that which you act out, fantasies and dreams) to explicit representations (causal links)." - J. P.

"I see science as a tool, not as a good way to describe reality" - J. P.

"In a marriage for the couple to be able to show their true face to each other, it should not be possible to run away, the vow should be taken seriously." - J. P.

"In order to find your genuine voice or even to move the truth forward, you have to be willing to be a fool, make mistakes from an awkward position." - J. P.

"People live in stories they tell about themselves and they use these stories to interpret everything around them" - J. P.

"It is best to define belief as that which you act out. We don't act as if the world is material, we act as if the world is filled with potential and that we have the power to shape it" - J. P.

"Just as the laws constrain us, each of us limit the law due to the Divine spark in us which exists because we believe in free will." - J. P.

"Morality itself implicitly emerges before it's representation does, as a consequence of repeated social interactions" - J. P.

"The structure and behaviours associated with the ethic emerges first, we act it out, then later it is mapped - represented, only much later is it articulated." - JP

"Unless you have people operating within a shared framework of perception and value, they can't cooperate and compete peacefully." - JP

"You are morally obligated to do things other than which you like" - JP

"If you minimize the cultural differences (as you do with egalitarian social policies) then you allow the biological differences to manifest themselves fully." - JP

"The problem with treating other people as casual sexual partners is that you also treat yourself that way simultaneously" - JP

"Human beings are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication and reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group."  - The Status of Linguistics as a Science, 1929, Edward Sapir

“We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances
as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds
throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of
our language... we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the
organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.”
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941)

"A computer may arrive at a truth, but it is the human's role to make human meaning out of it. Meaning isn't some quality embedded into the fabric of our universe. It is a manufactured human ideal - a wonderful, enjoyable one at that." - DJ

"You have been so spoiled by our contemporary brand of realism that you cannot accept anything that is a bit fantastic" - Ivan

“I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” - Blaise Pascal

"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." - G. K. Chesterton

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" -  C. Hitchens

"Truth is the correspondence between beliefs about reality and reality itself." - Lesswrong

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." - Charlie Chaplin

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -  not Mahatma Gandhi

"Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once" - Caeser

"Excessive obsession can result in great accomplishments, but it can also result in self-destruction" - Ning

"No plan survives contact with the enemy." - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

"That knowing is better than wondering, That waking is better than sleeping and that even the biggest failure, even the worst most intractable mistakes beats the hell out of never trying" - Grey's anatomy

'You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.' - J.M. Barrie

"Mistakes are painful but they are the only way to really find out who you are." - Grey's Anatomy

'Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.' - Sanchita Pandey

"One of the advantages of telling the truth is that you dont have to remember what you said" - Mark Twain

"Living is most important. It doesn't matter if we're useful or not, only if we can live according to our hearts or not, if we can live happily." - Luoluo

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."  - David Hume

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. " - John Tukey, The future of data analysis. Ann. Math. Stat. 33 (1), (1962)

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” - Bertrand Russel

"Piracy Is a Service Problem" - Gabe Newell

"Those who cannot trust anyone, cannot earn the trust of others." - I am not a Robot

"You can feel another person's sincerity once that person is caught in a crisis" -  I am not a Robot

"Luck favours the prepared mind" - Louis Pasteur

"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too" - Eugene Wigner

"Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way followers do" - Hamming

"Comprehension is a kind of data compression, understanding something means being able to figure out a simple set of rules that explains the phenomenon" - Gregory Chaitin

"Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means." - Errett Bishop

"Do not try to solve the problem, try to understand the problem. The answer will then jump out of the sheets." - Ali Nesin

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." - Bertrand Russell

"It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things.” - Leibniz

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” - Teddy Roosevelt

"The medium is the message" - Marshal McLuhan

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde

"LessWrong attracts autodidacts who think they are polymaths. That is, people who have developed a simple working framework for many fields or many questions of interest, and who then mistake that for genuine knowledge or expertise" - Mitchell Porter

"Beliefs should constrain our expectations and those that are true no matter what we see are what constitutes blind faith" - Eliezer Yudkowsky

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on the one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system more or less coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel–a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance–and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or esthetic principle."–Isaiah Berlin {The Hedgehog and the Fox}.

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  - Josh Billings

“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.” - Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t." - Erica Jong

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily." - Zig Ziglar

"Remembering that you are going to Die is the best way to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you have something to lose." - Steve Jobs

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there." - Steve Jobs

"Interesting theories challenge weakly held beliefs" - Coffee Break

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion" - George Santayana

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” - G.K. Chesterton’s

"Introverts experience less and reflect more while extroverts experience more and reflect less" - Casually explained

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid." - Chernobyl

"Where I would once fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?" - Chernobyl

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.” - G.K. Chesterton

"Nonetheless a distinction can be made between fundamental criteria of action (I hesitate to call them aesthetics at this point) which are hidden, implicit, and unexpressed, from those that are made explicit, revealed, and given for consideration to others without the threat of compulsion. It is only the latter that are aesthetics. The former we can categorize as mere prejudice or, at best, unconsidered preferences." - BlackOxford

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt

"I have been driven by curiosity rather than certainty, by the wish to understand rather than the desire to pass judgement." - Ramachandra Guha

"All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. They are inseperable" - Exurb1a

"Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world" - Exurb1a

"It takes a lot of work to ignore his nastiness and work with him, but sadly it never pays off. Now it's also a lot of work to ignore him. But that is worth the effort. If we all collectively ignore him, he will cease to exist" - John Baez on Lubos

"Just as deduction should be supplemented by intuition, so the impulse to progressive generalization must be tempered and balanced by respect and love for colorful detail. The individual problem should not be degraded to the rank of special illustration of lofty general theories. In fact, general theories emerge from consideration of the specific, and they are meaningless if they do not serve to clarify and order the more particularized substance below. The interplay between generality and individuality, deduction and construction, logic and imagination—this is the profound essence of live mathematics. Any one or another of these aspects of mathematics can be at the center of a given achievement. In a far-reaching development all of them will be involved. Generally speaking, such a development will start from the “concrete” ground, then discard ballast by abstraction and rise to the lofty layers of thin air where navigation and observation are easy; after this
flight comes the crucial test of landing and reaching specific goals in the newly surveyed low plains of individual “reality.” In brief, the flight into abstract generality must start from and return to the concrete and specific." - Richard Courant

"Blame yourself for a short time, remember it for a long time." - While you were sleeping

"Son, it's a truly lucky man who knows what he wants to do in his life, because he will never work a day in his life. But there are a few, precious few and hell I don't know if they are lucky or not. There are a few people who find something they have to do, something that obsesses them; something if they can't do it will drive them clean out their mind." - Shelby in Ford v Ferrari

"If life goes always smoothly you will never grow up." - Meteor Garden

Most of what we regret in life is about what we did not do, not what we did. - Father is Strange

"The infliction of pleasure is as effective and elating a tool of power as the infliction of pain." - Ignatius

"There is no such thing as meaningless pain" - Chicago Typewriter

"People who avoid commitment are people who know what a big thing it is" - Foreman

"For geeks your identity is based on the things you consume rather than what you do." - NerdLove

"What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean" - S1E3 Dark

"... it's a heap of outdated excuses for not wanting the things we couldn't have." - Quarentine

"Do you think God stays in heaven because he too, lives in fear of what he's created?" - Steve Buscemi

"To those who have learned to divorce hope from reason" - Arundhati Roy

"Dance, like nobody is watching you. Love, like you’ve never been hurt. Sing, like nobody is listening you. Work, like you don’t need money. Live, like today is the last day to live." - Alfred. D. Suja

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse." - Black Belt Bayesian

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." - Henry Palmerstone

"To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child" - Way of Kings

"I find nothing more frightening than a man trying to do what he has decided is important. Very little in the world has ever gone astray - at least on a grand scale - because a person decided to be frivolous." - Words of Radiance

"Hurtful painful memories, memories of deep regrets, memories of hurting others and getting hurt, memories of being abandoned. Only those with such memories buried in their hearts can become stronger, more passionate, and emotionally flexible. Only those can attain happiness. So don't forget any of it. Remember it all and overcome it. If you don't overcome it, you will always be a kid whose soul doesn't grow." - It's Okay to Not Be Okay

“A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” - Einstein

“When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” - Viktor E. Frankl

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” - Albert Camus

“If you give somebody constraints, it’s easier to be creative, the enemy of art is the absence of limitation." - Orson Welles

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” - Alan Kay

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Robert J. Hanlon

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

“Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretations of things” - Yalom

"Sometimes you must hurt in order to know, fall in order to grow, lose in order to gain, because life’s greatest lessons are learned through pain.” - Pain

"Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof." - Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." - Socrates

“Never forget what you are, the rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.” - Tyrion Lannister

"Each player must accept the cards life deals him. But once they are in hand, he alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game." - Voltaire

One evening, an elderly Cherokee brave told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’ The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, ‘Grandpa, which wolf wins?’ The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one that you feed.’ - Cherokee parable

"The truth will set you free" - verse 8:32 of the Gospel of John

"If we realize we’re in the cave, isn’t that the same, sort of, as escaping from it? Actually, if “ultimate reality” is inaccessible to us, isn’t that the same, sort of, as saying that it doesn’t exist? And hence that the cave, the world in which we live each and every day, is the one and only reality?" - John Horgan

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" - Anthony Weldon


Quotes by Anonymous

"The good stories - you understand them, but the great stories - they understand you."

"After a point, being rich just gives you more choices."

"Things left unsaid between people stack up to form walls."

"The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."

"When you’re accustomed to privileging, equality feels like oppression."

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"You can't avoid pain you can at least choose which one."

"It's never about achieving perfection, it never was. It's about striving for it."

"Don't ask questions to whose answer you aren't prepared/don't want to hear the answer to."

"It's not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them defines us"

To err is human, to forgive divine.

"Nihilism is a form of radical pluralism, which considers the effectiveness of any methodological prescription to be so context sensitive as to render it not explanatory on its own."

"Hurt feelings don't supersede the honest pursuit of truth."

"Who can say if it is we who make the choice, or if it's the choice that makes us."

"Tell me, I’ll forget
Show me, I’ll remember
Involve me, I’ll understand"
- Chinese Proverb

"Clear communication is also crucial for the broader scientific enterprise because concept transfer’ is a rate-limiting step in scientific cross-pollination."

"A black belt is simply a white belt who didn’t quit"

“Wear your weakness as armour and it can never be used to hurt you.”

Words are a way to create boundaries around  information. Record a pattern of phenomena observed by us."

"Adults have a low tolerance for looking incompetent and this slows them in learning new stuff."

"Communication is how we assimilate into one."

"Hope is sweeter than success"

"A spearhead that had known fighting was better than a new one. You could know it had been used by a man fighting for his life and that it had remained sure and not broken. The marks that remained were signs of strength."

"Intentions matter but consequences matter more."

"Pick your axioms very carefully, and always be aware of them."

"You should choose to believe your ideology is true because it's useful not because it's true."

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist"

"Learn from the past, act in the present, and plan for the future. Don't beat yourself for what you did, procrastinate or fear for what may happen."

"Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game"