| c600BC |  | The First Philosophers
"Philosophy begins with Thales" | The First Philosophers |
| c450BC |  | CONFUCIUS
"The object of the superior man is truth" | The Analects |
| c355BC |  | PLATO
"Until Philosophers are kings...cities will never have rest from their troubles" | The Republic
The Symposium
The Apology |
| c300BC |  | ARISTOTLE
"If it is in our power to act nobly, it is also in our power to do evil" | Nicomachean Ethics
The Politics |
| c300BC |  | EPICURUS
"No pleasure is a bad thing in itself" | Sovran Maxims |
| c50BC |  | CICERO
"Virtue is the foundation of friendship" | On Friendship and Old Age |
| c180AD |  | Marcus AURELIUS
"...We live but for a moment" | Meditations |
| c390 |  | St AUGUSTINE
"Too late have I come to love you, O beauty so ancient and so fresh" | Confessions |
| c520 |  | Severinus BOETHIUS
"The good are always strong" | The Consolation of Philosophy |
| 1515 |  | Desiderius ERASMUS
"Fortune favours the fool" | In Praise of Folly |
| 1515 |  | Thomas MORE
"All princes have more delights in warlike matters... than in the good feats of peace" | Utopia |
| 1520 |  | Niccolò MACHIAVELLI
"Men ought either to be well treated or crushed" | The Prince |
| 1543 |  | Nicolaus COPERNICUS
"Therefore, the earth is not flat" | Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs |
| 1605 |  | Francis BACON
"if a man ... be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. | The Advancement of Learning |
| 1637 |  | René DESCARTES
"I think, therefore I am" | Meditations on First Philosophy
Discourse on Method |
| 1651 |  | Thomas HOBBES
"...the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" | Leviathan |
| 1660 |  | Blaise PASCAL
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" | Thoughts |
| 1677 |  | Baruch SPINOZA
"there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope" | Ethics |
| 1677 |  | Isaac NEWTON
"I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me" | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy |
| 1690 |  | John LOCKE
"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts" | Essay Concerning Human Understanding |
| 1698 |  | Gottfried LEIBNIZ
"The soul is the mirror of the universe" | Monadology |
| 1710 |  | George BERKELEY
"Essence IS perception" | Principles of Human Knowledge |
| 1751 |  | David HUME
"It is never possible to deduce judgements of value from matters of fact" | Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding |
| 1762 |  | Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU
"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in irons" | The Social Contract |
| 1776 |  | Adam SMITH
"It is not from the benevolence of the.. baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" | The Wealth of Nations |
| 1781 |  | Immanuel KANT
"Reason is the pupil of itself alone. It is the oldest of the sciences" | Critiques of Pure & Practical Reason
Metaphysics of Morals |
| 1789 |  | Jeremy BENTHAM
"Mankind is governed by pain and pleasure" | Principles of Morals and Legislation |
| 1792 |  | Thomas PAINE
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil" | The Rights of Man |
| 1792 |  | Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT
"I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves" | Vindication of the Rights of Women |
| 1795 |  | Le Marquis De SADE
"Cruelty is a virtue, not a vice" | Philosophy in the Boudoir |
| 1795 |  | Auguste COMTE
"Society... cannot be regarded as composed of individuals" | Positive Philosophy |
| 1830 |  | Carl Von CLAUSEWITZ
"War is the continuation of politics by other means" | On War |
| 1835 |  | Alexis de TOCQEVILLE
"In America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself" | Democracy in America |
| 1832 |  | GWF HEGEL
"God is the absolute truth" | The Philosophy of Religion
The Philosophy of History |
| 1836 |  | Ralph Waldo EMERSON
"A man is a god in ruins" | Nature |
| 1844 |  | Arthur SCHOPENHAUER
"We can surely never arrive at the nature of things from without" | The World as Will and Idea |
| 1846 |  | MARX and ENGELS
"The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas" | The Communist Manifesto
The German Ideology |
| 1859 |  | John Stuart MILL
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign" | On Liberty
A System of Logic |
| 1854 |  | Henry D THOREAU
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices" | Walden |
| 1859 |  | Charles DARWIN
"...endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved" | On The Origin of Species |
| 1886 |  | Friedrich NIETZSCHE
"When you stare into an abyss ... the abyss also stares into you". | Beyond Good and Evil |
| 1902 |  | William JAMES
"If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience". | Varieties of Religious Experience |
| 1910 |  | Sigmund FREUD
"...we men... find reality generally quite unsatisfactory" | Psychoanalysis |
| 1916 |  | Albert EINSTEIN
"Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice)" | Relativity |
| 1921 |  | Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN
"The world is the totality of facts, not things" | Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus |
| 1936 |  | A.J. AYER
"...logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else" | Language, Truth + Logic |
| 1945 |  | Jean-Paul SARTRE
"Once freedom has exploded in the soul of man, the gods no longer have any power over him" | Existentialism is a Humanism |
| 1950 |  | Alan TURING
"Can machines think?" | Computing Machinery & Intelligence |
| 1957 |  | Sir Karl POPPER
"Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification" | The Logic of Scientific Discovery |
| 1964 |  | Ayn RAND
"Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness" | The Virtue of Selfishness |
| | | | |
| | | The Aphorisms
Hundreds upon hundreds of handy quotations | |
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