Only the dead have seen the end of war.
— Plato
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.
— Lao Tzu
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.
We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
Liberty consists in doing what one desires.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
— Plato
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
I think, therefore I am.
God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
To be is to be perceived.
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
— Socrates
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.
Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Time is a flat circle.
Even while they teach, men learn.
— Seneca
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
— Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.
— Socrates
The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.
— Plato
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
— Plato
One cannot step twice in the same river.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
— Socrates
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
— Buddha
Man is condemned to be free.
The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
The past has no power over the present moment.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
All is one.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Happiness is the highest good.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
— Lao Tzu
All men by nature desire knowledge.
The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.
— Socrates
The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone.
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Virtue is nothing else than right reason.
— Seneca
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
— Socrates
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
— Plato
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature.
— Spinoza
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Man is the measure of all things.
He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
— Socrates
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
The object of the superior man is truth.
Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.