T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.”
Source: Past and Present: Chartism and Sartor Resartus
“The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.”
Source: The Republic
“The philosopher is Nature's pilot.”
Source: Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy
“The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.”
Source: Zettel
“The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.”
“The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.”
Source: Impossible Objects
“The philosopher John Locke once noted that pursuing happiness is “the foundation of liberty.” This idea is at the core of the Declaration of Independence, the document that gave birth to our nation. The Declaration asserts that each of us is endowed with certain “unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are created for the purpose of protecting these rights. The
use of drugs in the pursuit of happiness, in my view, is arguably an act that the government is obliged to safeguard.
[So] why is our government arresting hundreds of thousands of Americans each year for using drugs, for pursuing pleasure, for seeking happiness?”
Source: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
“The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you five, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you ninety-seven, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking to is operating with a wholly different logic from your own.”
“The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that "Great Art" is "truth-disclosing," and therefore, following the thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heidegger asserted that Great Art only existed in the past. Indeed, even Heidegger would have wavered on whether Great Art - or Hegel's "art and the absolute" - survived into the seventeenth century, the time of St Peter's and the baroque. Just the same, Heidegger reasoned that in the modern era Great Art is dead; art may still exist but it is not great. It cannot be great because it is propelled by aesthetics rather than truth. Without truth there is no philosophy of art.
To be true, art must, in Hegel's and Heidegger's terms, be accepted by a culture as a whole. I believe we can say with some certainty that the Catholic world as a whole accepted this building and saw it much as worshippers and pilgrims experienced Chartres Cathedral, for instance, in the thirteenth century: it is the Heavenly Jerusalem come to earth.”
Source: Baroque Visual Rhetoric
“The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.”
“The Philosopher-Poet’s mind is always in the here-and-now when he’s with his tribe and elsewhere in the red universe when he’s on his own.”
Source: Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
“The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.”
Source: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
“The Philosopher's Motto: I came, I saw, I pondered!”
“The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound health when you enter.”
Source: The Discourses
“The Philosopher's Stone was called Silence.”
“The Philosopher’s Weight by Stewart Stafford
Philosopher in my peripheral vision,
Pouring watery wisdom rapidly
Into my ear, then stepping back,
Smiling, he bid me go on my way.
What he said made my way clearer,
But added to the burden on my back,
While lightening his own load,
In guiding a stranger through the dark.
What advice did the wise one give me?
"Follow one step with another and live,
My son, use any difficulty you find
As a beacon on your journey to salvation."
© 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
“The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.”
“The philosopher says think your way out. The sensualist says play your way out but none of it works.”
“The philosopher should be a man willing to listen to every suggestion,but determined to judge for himself.He should not be a respector of persons,but of things.Truth should be his primary object.”
Source: The Life and Letters of Faraday
“The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.”
“The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the crowd, hears, and only translates what he hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.”
Source: A village commune. Idalia. Silver chimes and golden fetters.
“The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.”
“The philosopher who travels the world in order to learn must put up with all customs, all religions, all kinds of weather and climate, all beds and all kinds of food, and leave to the voluptuous, indolent man in the capital his prejudices...his luxury...that obscene luxury that, as it never contains any real needs, creates artificial ones every day at the expense of fortune and health.”
Source: Virtue
“The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.”
Source: The Cynic's Breviary: Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort
“The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.”
“The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.”
Source: In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays
“The philosopher's soul dwells in his head, the poet's soul is in his heart; the singer's soul lingers about his throat, but the soul of the dancer abides in all her body.”
“The philosopher, who with calm suspicion examines the dreams and omens, the miracles and prodigies, of profane or even of ecclesiastical history, will probably conclude that, if the eyes of the spectators have sometimes been deceived by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more frequently been insulted by fiction.”
Source: History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire V2: the History Focus
“The philosopher: he alone knows how to live for himself. He is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing: how to live.”
“The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.”
Source: The Testament
“The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question whether or not a man can condemn himself.”
“The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.”
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
Source: Eleven Theses on Feuerbach
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”
“The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.”
Source: Rationality
“The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.”
Source: The Guide for the Perplexed
“The philosophers make still another objection: "What you gain in rigour," they say, "you lose in objectivity. You can rise toward your logical ideal only by cutting the bonds which attach you to reality. Your science is infallible, but it can only remain so by imprisoning itself in an ivory tower and renouncing all relation with the external world. From this seclusion it must go out when it would attempt the slightest application.”
Source: The Value of Science
“The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.”
“The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.”
Source: The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies
“The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter.”
“The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.”
Source: The Standardization of Error
“The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse.”
Source: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
“The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair.”
“The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.”
Source: The Flower to the Painter
“The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.”
“The philosophic goal in China was a search for harmony and perfection, not the discovery of truth by reasoning. In China’s Confucian society, the best pathway to perfection was the development of a virtuous life.”
Source: Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order
“The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.”
Source: Healing of the Self, the Negatives: Notebooks
“The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
Source: The Martyrdom of Man