PHILOSOPHICAL PHRASES: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL QUOTES FROM PHILOSOPHERS TO BE INSPIRED BY

Literally, the term "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". All those who embrace this discipline ask themselves questions about any aspect of existence and try to find an answer to it. They investigate the world, God, the meaning of life and also emotions and feelings, such as happiness and love, and try to prove the truth of their words through logic, analysis and rhetoric. Obviously, over the years philosophers have provided us with different and contrasting reflections, depending on their era or their specific vision of the world, but, in any case, their sentences never cease to fascinate and inspire us.

We have collected the most famous philosophical phrases that tell with their words the various situations of human existence. They range from aphorisms about happiness to those about love, time and the importance of freedom. Each sentence can open our minds and make us notice details of our daily life that maybe we took for granted, but which, on the other hand, can prove to be fundamental.

The best philosophical aphorisms about life

Certainly, the topic most frequently addressed by philosophers of the past and today is that of life. Some have tried to define it, others to find a purpose. The result of their investigations is this kaleidoscopic collection of quotes.

Life is really very simple; but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.
Sören Kierkegaard

Life always waits for some crisis before revealing itself in all its glory.
Paulo Coehlo

Life is like a mirror: it smiles at you if you look at it smiling.
Jim Morrison

the trick of human existence lies not only in living, but also in knowing what one is living for.
Fedor Dostoevsky

Start living right away and see each day as a life unto itself.
Lucio Anneo Seneca

Life is like an echo: if you don't like what it sends back to you, you have to change the message you send.
James Joyce

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you do, the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of life is to live in harmony with nature.
Zeno of Citium

Think of each day as a life of its own.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Life must be lived as a game.
Plato

Live every day of your life as if it were the last.
Lucio Anneo Seneca

A proverb is never right for you until life has shown it to you.
John Keats

The most beautiful philosophical quotes on love

Often, in philosophy, love has taken on two opposite sides: that of a friend or that of an enemy. In fact, for some philosophers love is a deplorable feeling, which distances men from the highest duties and their existential purpose. For others, however, love is all that goes on in the world and that elevates human beings. Here are the most beautiful aphorisms on this topic.

Love is like war: easy to start, but very difficult to stop.
Henry Louis Mencken

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Love is the great ambush that nature has set for men to propagate their species.
Arthur Schopenhauer

In love don't be a beggar, be an emperor. He just gives and stays to see what happens.
Osho

What is done out of love is done well.
Vincent van Gogh

Love is looking for us just as we are looking for him.
Paramahansa Yogananda

Childhood love follows the principle: I love because I am loved.
Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love.
Immature love says: I love you because I need you.
Mature love says: I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm

Love is made up of a single soul that inhabits two bodies.
Aristotle

To love means to place our own in the happiness of others.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Whoever has been lucky enough to meet love, do everything to keep it alive, because love does not age. And whoever has not met him, open his heart to hope, since life is always a hope of love.
Nicola Abbagnano

To love is to want someone's good.
St. Thomas Aquinas

It is said that love makes us blind; it does more than this, it makes us deaf, it makes us paralyzed; he who suffers for love is like a mimosa plant that closes, and no lock pick opens it; the more violence is done, the more it becomes closes.
Sören Kierkegaard

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu

Famous philosophical phrases about happiness

When can a man be truly happy? Most likely, each of us would give a different answer to this question depending on our point of view and our subjectivity. Let's see what the philosophers have written about it.

Happiness is love, nothing else. Happy is he who knows how to love.
Hermann Hesse

One is never too young or too old for the knowledge of happiness
Epicurus

There is only one way to happiness, and that is to stop worrying about things that are beyond the control of our will.
Epictetus

If happiness is not shared it can hardly be called happiness; it has no flavor.
Charlotte Brontë

True happiness is cheap. If it is expensive, it is not of good quality.
François-René de Chateaubriand

The greatest happiness is not in never falling, but in always getting up after a fall.
Confucius

From time to time it is good to take a break in our pursuit of happiness and simply be happy.
Guillame Apollinaire

Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

The aphorisms of the philosophers on death and the passage of time

The flight of time and death frighten most people, but according to the philosophy we should not try to escape from them, but to make the most of every single day and live every moment as if it were the last. Here are a few sentences about this. thematic.

Dying is nothing, not living is scary.
Victor Hugo

Death smiles at everyone, a man cannot help but smile back at her.
Marcus Aurelius

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that has made your rose so important
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Those who think they live forever live badly.
Publilius Syrus

Cowards die many times before their death; the brave taste death only once.
William Shakespeare

It is not true that we have little time: the truth is that we lose a lot of it.
Lucio Anneo Seneca

The fear of death comes from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is ready to die at any moment.
Mark Twain

Time is the most precious thing a man can spend.
Theophrastus

Philosophical quotes on freedom

Another theme dear to philosophers is freedom. When can men truly be called free? Let us try to find an answer to this question in the midst of their words.

Freedom does not lie in choosing between black and white, but in escaping this prescribed choice.
Theodor Adorno

World history is nothing but the advancement of the awareness of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Man believes he wants freedom. In reality he is very afraid of it. Because? Because freedom forces him to make decisions, and decisions involve risks.
Erich Fromm

No one is free if he is not his own master.
Epictetus

If freedom means something, then it means the right to tell people things they don't want to hear.
George Orwell

The act of disobedience, as an act of freedom, is the beginning of reason.
Erich Fromm

Do you want to get true freedom? Make yourself a slave to philosophy.
Lucio Anneo Seneca

People are demanding free speech as compensation for the freedom of thought they rarely use.
Søren Kierkegaard

Being free is nothing, becoming it is a heavenly thing.
Fichte

The best philosophical phrases about friendship

If love has always had ambivalent opinions, friendship, on the other hand, is probably the feeling most dear to philosophers of all time. Describing it, the writers have distinguished true friends from opportunistic ones and have highlighted how this relationship is the most precious asset for every human being.

Three kinds of friends are useful, and three kinds are harmful. When friends are honest, sincere, or intelligent, they are helpful. When friends are fake, flattering, or opportunistic, they are harmful.
Confucius

The friendship of a single intelligent person is worth more than that of all the others put together.
Democritus

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod, my shadow does it much better.
Plutarch

Friendship is a single soul that lives in two bodies, a heart that beats in two souls.
Aristotle

Each shows what it is from the friends he has.
Gustave Flaubert

Of all the things that wisdom provides to achieve a happy existence, the greatest is friendship.
Epicurus

What makes friendships indissoluble and doubles their charm is a feeling that is lacking in love: certainty.
Honore de Balzac

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
Khalil Gibran

Philosophy aphorisms on how to live well

Finally, we conclude this review with philosophical phrases to inspire us in everyday life. They remind us how to live well, how to behave even in the event of a mistake and how important it is to value small things.

Three things are important in human life: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind.
Henry James

Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.
Martin Luther

All men make mistakes, but a wise man gives up when he realizes he has made a mistake and fixes the mistake. The only crime is pride.
Sophocles

Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.
Dalai Lama

Men must know that in this theater which is human life only God and the angels are allowed to act as spectators.
Francis Bacon

As difficult as life may seem, there is always something that can be done to be successful.
Stephen Hawking

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. You have to feel them with your heart.
Helen Keller

Being simple is the best thing in the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton