50 Philosophy Classics Quotes

“Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing: Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“For Pascal, lack of faith was a kind of laziness, a view summed up by T.S. Eliot in his introduction to the Pensées: “The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“All areas of a person’s life, whether it is work, marriage, or raising children, require outward effort, and it is the effort itself that brings about happiness.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“Disenchantment is a malady, and even if it is caused by particular circumstances, it is wise to overcome it as soon as possible. The more things a person is interested in, the greater their chances of happiness.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.”
William James, Pragmatism”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“A nation becomes great not by a mere imposition of order and power, but by letting go, knowing that there is much to gain by open discussion.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing: Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books