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Philosophers
49 thinkers from Thales to Camus. Filter by name, school, idea.
49 results
Era · Pre-Socratic
Era · Classical Greek
Era · Hellenistic & Roman
Epicurus
The good is what feels good – but learn what really does.
341 BCE – 270 BCE
Zeno of Citium
Virtue is the only good; everything else is indifferent.
334 BCE – 262 BCE
Marcus Tullius Cicero
True law is right reason in agreement with nature.
106 BCE – 43 BCE
Paul of Tarsus
Love is higher than wisdom.
5 CE – 64 CE
Marcus Aurelius
You have power over your mind, not outside events.
121 CE – 180 CE
Era · Late Antiquity
Era · Medieval
Era · Renaissance & Reformation
Era · Early Modern
René Descartes
I think, therefore I am.
1596 – 1650
Blaise Pascal
The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.
1623 – 1662
Baruch Spinoza
God, or Nature.
1632 – 1677
John Locke
The mind at birth is a blank slate.
1632 – 1704
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
1646 – 1716
David Hume
Reason is the slave of the passions.
1711 – 1776
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
1712 – 1778
Hryhorii Skovoroda
The world tried to catch me and never did.
1722 – 1794
Adam Smith
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our dinner, but from his regard to his own interest.
1723 – 1790
Immanuel Kant
Act only on a maxim you could will to be universal law.
1724 – 1804
Edmund Burke
Society is a contract between the living, the dead, and the unborn.
1729 – 1797
Era · Nineteenth Century
G.W.F. Hegel
The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.
1770 – 1831
Arthur Schopenhauer
The world is my representation, and underneath it, blind Will.
1788 – 1860
Alexis de Tocqueville
It does not break wills; it softens them.
1805 – 1859
John Stuart Mill
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
1806 – 1873
Søren Kierkegaard
Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.
1813 – 1855
Karl Marx
Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.
1818 – 1883
Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead, and we have killed him.
1844 – 1900
Era · Twentieth Century (to mid-century)
Edmund Husserl
To the things themselves.
1859 – 1938
Bertrand Russell
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
1872 – 1970
G. K. Chesterton
Tradition is the democracy of the dead.
1874 – 1936
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
1889 – 1951
Martin Heidegger
Why is there something rather than nothing?
1889 – 1976
Edith Stein
Whoever seeks truth seeks God, whether they know it or not.
1891 – 1942
C. S. Lewis
We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
1898 – 1963
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existence precedes essence.
1905 – 1980
Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
1908 – 1986
Albert Camus
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
1913 – 1960