Philosophical quotes can change your point of view in life when you are depressed and need real motivation. We can get inspired by the wise words about life by some of the greatest philosophers in history, such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and others.
Most famous philosophical quotes about life
- “Don’t live your life through what-ifs, live it with I knows.” – Marco Zuniga
- “It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death.” – Jim Morrison
- “Only the dead have seen the end of the war.” – Plato
- “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.” – Dalai Lama
- “Everyone is a genius.” – Albert Einstein
- “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee
- “Life without experience and sufferings is not life.” – Socrates
- “Eyes and ears are poor witnesses to people if they have uncultured souls.” – Heraclitus
- “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” – Bertrand Russell
- “When it is obvious that goals can’t be reached, don’t adjust the goals, but adjust the action steps.” – Confucius
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.” – Lao Tzu
- “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” – Aristotle
- “The more a man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.” – Confucius
- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
- “To know what people think, pay regard to what they do rather than what they say.” – René Descartes
- “We do not describe the world we see. We see the world we can describe.” – René Descartes
- “Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes – I mean the universe.” – Galileo
- “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- “A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.” – Confucius
- “Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.” – Albert Einstein
- “Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Art aims to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” – Aristotle
- “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts
- “If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu
- “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” – Socrates
- “Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Give instructions only to those people who seek knowledge after they have discovered their ignorance.” – Confucius
- “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
- “The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
- “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” – John Stuart Mill
- “No valid plans for the future can be made can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” – Alan Watts
- “The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” – Seneca
- “A ‘no’ uttered from deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Inspirational life philosophy quotes
- “Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.” – Socrates
- “The frog in the pond knows little of the great ocean.” – Zen Proverb
- “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.” – Zen Proverb
- “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.” – Margaret Mitchell
- “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.” – Franz Kafka
- “Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.” – Ray Bradbury
- “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
- “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” – C.G. Jung
- “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan W. Watts
- “Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.” – James Joyce
- “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” – Søren Kierkegaard
- “The more sand had escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
- “When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” – Lao Tzu
- “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.” – William S. Burroughs
- “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- “The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.” – Isabel Allende
- “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Kurt Vonnegut
- “If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” – Zen Proverb
- “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.” – Anaïs Nin
- “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Art and love are the same things: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.” – Chuck Klosterman
- “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell
- “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu
- “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality.” – Lao Tzu
- “The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
- “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” – Carl Jung
- “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” – Gabriel García Márquez
- “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” – Jim Morrison
- “You must let what happens to happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.” – Michael Ende
- “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” – Richard P. Feynman
Short philosophical quotes and sayings
- “When anger arises, think of the consequences.” – Confucius
- “The madness of love the greatest of heaven’s blessings.” – Plato
- “Prejudices are what fools use for reason.” – Francois Voltaire
- “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” – Aristotle
- “You could not step twice into the same river.” – Heraclitus
- “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Confucius
- “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle
- “Thinking. The talking of the soul with itself.” – Plato
- “If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them.” – Confucius
- “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” – Confucius
- “If they spit at you behind your back it means you’re ahead of them.” – Confucius
- “Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.” – Karl Marx
- “You only learn when you give your whole being to something.” – J. Krishnamurti
- “I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.” – Haruki Murakami
- “It’s strange how simple things become, once you see them clearly.” – Ayn Rand
- “Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.” – Hermann Hesse
- “I love those who yearn for the impossible.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – Aristotle
- “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your intelligence.” – Immanuel Kant
- “Never form a friendship with a man who is not better than you.” – Confucius
- “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” – Alan W. Watts
- “Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.” – Confucius
- “I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.” – Rumi
- “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.” – René Descartes
- “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” – Confucius
- “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” – Soren Kierkegaard
- “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” – Alan Watts
- “It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
- “Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” – Alan Watts
- “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.” – Philip K. Dick