The Shortest Form of Wisdom: One-liners.
Music creates time. ~ Anonymous
Nature loves to hide. Heraclitus
The bow is called life, but its work is death. Heraclitus
The less you know the more you think you know.
“We live in the best of all possible worlds” – Leibniz
"Cultures are operating systems for brains." ~ Terence McKenna
“One cannot step twice in the same river” – Heraclitus
“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” – William of Ockham
“Even while they teach, men learn” – Seneca the Younger
“The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Thomas Hobbes
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him” – Voltaire
“This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities” – Bertrand Russell
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another” – René Descartes
“Leisure is the mother of philosophy” – Thomas Hobbes
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers” – William James
“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me” – G. W. F. Hegel
“The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone” – John Locke
“Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward ” – Søren Kierkegaard
“Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know” – Bertrand Russell
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck” – Immanuel Kant
“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits” – William James
“History is Philosophy teaching by examples” – Thucydides
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” – Aristotle
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – Plato
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly” – Francis Bacon
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – mistakenly attributed to Edmund Burke
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” – Bertrand Russell
“Religion is the sign of the oppressed ... it is the opium of the people” – Karl Marx
“Happiness is the highest good” – Aristotle
“If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil” – Baruch Spinoza
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it” – Epicurus
“What is rational is real, and what is real is rational”” – G. W. F. Hegel
“Man is condemned to be free” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth” – John Locke
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless” – Plato
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing” – Socrates
“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” – Voltaire (in parody of Leibniz)
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays” – Søren Kierkegaard
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” – Denis Diderot
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things” – René Descartes
“Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative” – Aristotle
“I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature” – Spinoza
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx
“It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” – W. K. Clifford
“Virtue is nothing else than right reason” – Seneca the Younger
“Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire” – Epictetus
“In everything, there is a share of everything” – Anaxagoras
“A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion” – Sir Francis Bacon
“The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures” – Democritus
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature” – John Locke
“To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” – John Stuart Mill
“Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“Man is the measure of all things” – Protagoras
“We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone” – St. Augustine
“The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone” – John Locke