Philosophy Quotes

Questions about meaning, existence, and truth from thinkers who spent their lives searching for answers.

43879 quotes

"Society maintains itself through the constant renewal of shared beliefs."
Émile Durkheim
"Suicide rates vary inversely with the degree of social integration."
Émile Durkheim
"Each individual is the carrier of the collective consciousness."
Émile Durkheim
"Society is not a luxury but a necessity for human existence."
Émile Durkheim
"Without shared moral sentiments, society would dissolve into chaos."
Émile Durkheim
"We understand ourselves best by understanding our society."
Émile Durkheim
M
"The Protestant ethic has made us all servants to an iron cage of rationalization."
Max Weber
M
"We are caught between tradition and modernity, unable to fully embrace either."
Max Weber
M
"We are trapped in systems far larger than ourselves, yet we cannot live without them."
Max Weber
M
"Every system of authority contains within it the contradictions that will eventually destroy it."
Max Weber
M
"We mistake material progress for moral progress at great peril."
Max Weber
M
"We live in the ruins of once-coherent worldviews."
Max Weber
H
"Every discipline of study reveals something profound about the nature of reality."
Harriet Martineau
H
"To know oneself is the beginning of wisdom and the foundation of a worthy life."
Harriet Martineau
H
"The study of human nature reveals both our capacity for great good and great harm."
Harriet Martineau
M
"Philosophy teaches us to question our assumptions and examine our beliefs."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
H
"Progress is not an accident but a necessity."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Morality can be neither created nor destroyed, but only modified in form."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Civilization is the establishment of property."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."
Herbert Spencer
H
"To have become a philosophical spirit is to have become a citizen of the world."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The individual is to society what the cell is to the organism."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Objects in themselves are nothing; they become somethings only through our thinking."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The worth of a state is the worth of the individuals composing it."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Individuality is the basis of society."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Pleasures are all we live for; yet we deplore them."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The universe, as we know it, is a union of the knowable and the unknowable."
Herbert Spencer
H
"Reason is the most precious faculty in man."
Herbert Spencer
H
"The degree of civilization is the measure of the restraint of violence."
Herbert Spencer