Sourced and curated.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Plato, Theaetetus · 400 BC

★ 9.7

Courtroom speech · Speech · Philosophical literature

Plato, Apology · 399 BC

★ 9.7

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain... And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 9.6

And with the guts of the last priest Let's wring the neck of the last king.

Denis Diderot

1772

★ 9.6

Philosophical dialogue · Philosophical literature

Man is the measure of all things.

Protagoras

Plato, Theaetetus · 420 BC

★ 9.4

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

Philosophical literature · Religious literature

1762

★ 9.4

Presocratic fragment · Fragment · Philosophical literature

Know thyself.

Thales

Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

★ 9.3

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching · 400 BC

★ 9.2

All men by nature desire to know.

Metaphysics · 322 BC

★ 9.2

I think, therefore I am.

Rene Descartes

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 9.1

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The Life of Reason · 1905

★ 8.8

Man is by nature a political animal.

Politics · 350 BC

★ 8.7

I am condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness · 1943

★ 8.5

Nature abhors a vacuum.

The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Ethics · 1677

★ 8.5

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Democracy passes into despotism.

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 8.3

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

For our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 8.3

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 8.2

For the one thing even God cannot do is change the past.

Agathon

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

★ 8.2

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

For what should a man live, if not for the pleasures of discourse?

Plato

Phaedrus · 370 BC

★ 8.2

Courtroom speech · Speech · Philosophical literature

I know that I do not know.

Plato, Apology · 399 BC

★ 8.1

No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.

Politics · 350 BC

★ 8.1

One swallow does not make a spring.

What I say is that "just" or "right" means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party.

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 8.1

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Thrasymachus

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 8.1

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Behold! human beings living in an underground den... Like ourselves... They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Politics · 350 BC

★ 8.1

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 8.0

Curiosity...is a Lust of the mind.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 8.0

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 7.9

Treatise · Political literature · Philosophical literature

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince · 1532

★ 7.9

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 7.9

We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it.

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 7.7

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Twilight of the Idols · 1889

★ 7.7

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 7.7

"Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!"

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

The Gay Science · 1882

★ 7.6

Be like a headland of rock on which the waves break incessantly: but it stands fast and around it the seething of the waters sinks to rest.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 7.6

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 7.5

Life always gets harder toward the summit-the cold increases, responsibility increases.

The Antichrist · 1895

★ 7.4

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

Rights of Man · 1792

★ 7.3

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…it is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right · 1883

★ 7.3

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.3

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 7.3

This is hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 7.3

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face.

The Gay Science · 1882

★ 7.3

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Politics · 350 BC

★ 7.2

A liar should have a good memory.

Quintilian

Institutio Oratoria · 95

★ 7.2

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

The Concept of Anxiety · 1844

★ 7.2

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?

Epictetus

The Enchiridion · 135

★ 7.1

O happy race of mortals, if your hearts are ruled, as is the universe, by Love!

Boethius

The Consolation of Philosophy · 523

★ 7.1

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 7.1

Man is a social animal.

Economic literature · Philosophical literature

Ethics · 1677

★ 7.1

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.

Adam Smith

The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759

★ 7.1

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Immanuel Kant

1784

★ 7.1

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx

Theses on Feurbach · 1845

★ 7.1

This only is denied even to God, The power to make what has been done undone.

Agathon

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics · 350 BC

★ 7.1

We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Philosophical literature · Historical literature

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.1

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy of History · 1832

★ 7.1

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus · 1921

★ 7.1

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Albert Camus

The Rebel · 1951

★ 7.1

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free.

1862

★ 7.0

Ancient times were the youth of the world.

Francis Bacon

1605

★ 7.0

For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

Francis Bacon

Novum Organum · 1620

★ 7.0

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.0

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

Epictetus

The Enchiridion · 135

★ 7.0

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worn, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Pensees · 1670

★ 7.0

The most perfect of all works of art is true political freedom.

Friedrich Schiller

1794

★ 7.0

The State is not "abolished", it withers away.

Friedrich Engels

Anti-Duhring · 1878

★ 7.0

Presocratic fragment · Fragment · Philosophical literature

One cannot step twice into the same river, for the waters are continually flowing on.

Heraclitus

★ 7.0

It therefore comes to pass that everyone is fond of relating his own exploits and displaying the strength both of his body and his mind, and that men are on this account a nuisance one to the other.

Ethics · 1677

★ 6.9

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Charles Dudley Warner

1870

★ 6.9

The deepest definition of Youth is, Life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Alfred North Whitehead

1933

★ 6.9

Presocratic fragment · Fragment · Philosophical literature

If cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-like gods, cows cow-like gods, and each species would have made the gods' bodies just like their own.

Xenophanes

★ 6.9

The man of talent is like the marksman who hits a mark the others cannot hit; the man of genius is like the marksman who hits a mark they cannot even see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Idea · 1819

★ 6.9

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Theodor Adorno

Minima Moralia · 1951

★ 6.9

In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 6.5

There was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

The Antichrist · 1895

★ 6.5

The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the cause of its destruction.

The Social Contract · 1762

★ 6.4

If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 6.4

I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Rene Descartes

Meditations on First Philosophy · 1641

★ 6.3

Philosophical literature · Historical literature

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy of History · 1832

★ 6.3

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasions for it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Discourses on Livy · 1531

★ 6.2

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

The Utility of Religion · 1873

★ 6.2

Novel · Philosophical literature

Albert Camus

The Fall · 1956

★ 6.2

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus · 1942

★ 6.1

God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood. God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil. For as long as men bow before altars, mankind will remain damned, the slaves of kings and priests.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The System of Economic Contradictions · 1846

★ 6.0

Philosophical literature · Religious literature

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching · 400 BC

★ 5.8

Philosophical dialogue · Philosophical literature

The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 5.8

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 5.7

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

How, then, might we contrive... One noble lie to persuade if possible the rulers themselves, but failing that the rest of the city?

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 5.7

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Friends have all things in common.

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 5.7

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Plato

Phaedrus · 370 BC

★ 5.7

The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

Politics · 350 BC

★ 5.7

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Politics · 335 BC

★ 5.7

The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool.

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

Rhetoric · 322 BC

★ 5.7

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 5.6

One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

Treatise · Political literature · Philosophical literature

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince · 1532

★ 5.5

The last act is bloody, no matter how happy the rest of the play.

Pensees · 1670

★ 5.5

Censorship is crucial for preserving morals but useless for restoring them.

The Social Contract · 1762

★ 5.5

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.

The Social Contract · 1762

★ 5.5

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

For every thing that lives is Holy.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1794

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our to-day.

Human, All Too Human · 1878

★ 5.5

It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 5.5

The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

Genealogy of Morals · 1887

★ 5.5

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment-but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God's second mistake.

The Antichrist · 1895

★ 5.5

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon

Novum Organum · 1620

★ 5.5

God and all the attributes of God are eternal.

Ethics · 1677

★ 5.5

It is one thing, to show a man that he is in an error; and another, to put him in possession of truth.

John Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding · 1690

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

Ecce Homo · 1908

★ 5.5

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.

Rene Descartes

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 5.4

The American Constitutions were to Liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.

Rights of Man · 1791

★ 5.4

I compare it to something behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when by an accident, the curtain happens to be opened, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.

I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

Rights of Man · 1792

★ 5.4

Pamphlet · Religious literature · Philosophical literature