The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people
Mark Twain
A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing
Ambrose Bierce
To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do
Bertrand Russell
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations
Aldous Huxley
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it
Bertrand Russell
While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Jefferson
Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.
John Keats
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
Francis Bacon
To a philosopher no circumstance, however trifling, is too minute.
Oliver Goldsmith
To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.
Sir Thomas Browne
So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians cages.
James Bovard