13 Great Philosophical
Quotes About Life

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

David Hume
(An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates
(Quoted by Plato in the Apology)

The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.

Seneca
(Letters from a Stoic - Letter LXX)

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell
(What I Believe, 1925)

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung
(Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933)

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He is the happiest man who can set the end of his life in connection with the beginning.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Maxims and Reflections, 1819)

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.

Francis Bacon
(Of Adversity, 1625)

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Spinoza
(The Ethics - Part IV, 1677)

Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Marcus Aurelius
(Meditations - Book II, 167 A.C.E)

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Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Cicero
(Tusculan Disputations, 45 BCE)

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Epicurus
(Principal Doctrines)

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Alan Watts

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So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.

Lucretius
(De Rerum Natura)