“Philosophy is nothing but discretion.”
“A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.”
“Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”
“If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.”
“Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”
“Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.”
“Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”
“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”
“The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.”
“And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.”
“All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”
“Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.”
“Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”
“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. -- The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”
“We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.”
“I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.”
“Plato was a bore.”
“Philosophy is doubt.”
“Philosophy is the product of wonder.”
“Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.”
“Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot.”
“Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”
“Philosophers are only men in armor after all.”
“Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.”
“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”
“There is no record in history of a happy philosopher.”
“The philosopher must station themselves in the middle.”
“Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.”