Philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy

1844–1900

"I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer."

🇿🇦David Hume

Philosophy

Empiricism

1796–1864

"Hume Society: An international scholarly society."

Charles Darwin

Science

1758–1778

"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy

Idealism

1770–1831

"This final aim is God's purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect Being, and can, therefore, will nothing but himself."

Seneca the Younger

Philosophy

Stoic

-4–65

"“New friends, however, will not be the same.” No, nor will you yourself remain the same; you change with every day and every hour."

Epictetus

Philosophy

Stoic

50–138

"You become what you give your attention to."

Marcus Aurelius

Philosophy

Stoic

"Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquility."

🇺🇸Thomas Jefferson

Politics

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law [this quote is referring to English Common Law]."

🇺🇸Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature

Western philosophy

1803–1882

"Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not."

🇮🇳Mahatma Gandhi

Politics

nonviolence

1869–1948

"The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace."

🏛️Aristotle

Philosophy

peripatetic school

-384–-322

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

🇨🇳Sun Tzu

Literature

-544–-496

"In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power."

🇬🇧Francis Bacon

Literature

empiricism

1909–1992

"For it is a true rule, that love is ever rewarded either with the reciproque, or with an inward and secret contempt."

Socrates

Literature

-469–-398

"One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him."

Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy

empiricism

1588–1679

"And Beasts that have Deliberation, must necessarily also have Will."

🇮🇹Galileo Galilei

Science

1564–1642

"PBS Nova Online: Galileo's Battle for the Heavens"

Immanuel Kant

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1724–1804

"Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."

🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Confucius

Philosophy

Confucianism

-550–-478

"The superior man has neither anxiety nor fear. When internal examination discovers nothing wrong, what is there to be anxious about, what is there to fear?"

🇩🇪Karl Marx

Philosophy

Materialism

1867–1894

"What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose."

🇩🇪Friedrich Schiller

Literature

Sturm und Drang

1895–1990

"What one refuses in a minuteNo eternity will return."

Geoffrey Chaucer

Literature

1343–1400

"Chaucer at The Online Library of Liberty"

Zeno of Citium

Philosophy

stoicism

-333–-262

"No one entrusts a secret to a drunken man; but one will entrust a secret to a good man; therefore, the good man will not get drunk."

🇫🇷Voltaire

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1694–1778

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

🇮🇹Thomas Aquinas

Religion

scholasticism

1225–1274

"To love is to will the good of the other."

🇬🇧Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy

1861–1947

"Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place."

Plato

Philosophy

Platonism

"Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life."

🇫🇷Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy

Existentialism

1905–1980

"...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it."

Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophy

Idealism

1788–1860

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Michel de Montaigne

Philosophy

1533–1592

"He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."

🇺🇸William Blake

Art

Romanticism

"Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence."

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay."

🇧🇷Isaac Newton

Mathematics

Enlightenment

1934–2014

"What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean."

Augustine of Hippo

Philosophy

354–430

"Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith."

Niccolò Machiavelli

Philosophy

High Renaissance

1449–1527

"Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury."

🇫🇷René Descartes

Philosophy

rationalism

1596–1650

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

John Stuart Mill

Philosophy

Liberalism

1806–1873

"I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner."

🇺🇸John Locke

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1943–2006

"The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

🇺🇸William James

Psychology

pragmatism

1842–1910

"An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible."