Mark Manson Quotes

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

When we reason upon general subjects, one may justly affirm, that our speculations can scarce ever be too fine, provided they be just.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the "new age" label at them is also abhorrent.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Communists must always go into the why's and wherefore's of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence.

When all else fails, philosophize.