“The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the lightest.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book VII B
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Philosophy Quotes
363 quotes on philosophy and the big questions — from the classics to the everyday.
“To act without clear understanding, to form habits without examining them, to follow a path all your life without knowing where it goes — this is the behavior of the multitude.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book VII A
“The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book VI B
“The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame is the beginning of righteousness.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book II A
“Benevolence is the heart of man, and righteousness is the path of man.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book VI A
“A man must first despise himself, and then others will despise him.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book IV A
“He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature. Knowing his nature, he knows Heaven.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book VII A
“The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.”
Mencius · Mencius, Book IV B, c. 4th century BCE
“You are not the oil, you are not the air, merely the point of combustion between them.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald · The Crack-Up, 1936
“Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.”
Benjamin Disraeli · Vivian Grey, 1826
“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”
Plutarch · Moralia, c. 100 AD
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
William Shakespeare · Julius Caesar, c. 1599
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard · The Writing Life, 1989
“Confine yourself to the present.”
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, Book 8
“The man who laughs at another's misfortune has simply decided his own comfort matters more than someone else's pain. That is the whole of his character.”
Original
“Every city is a thousand private stories happening simultaneously, and you are one of them, no more or less.”
Original
“The person the world ignores is usually the one paying the closest attention to it.”
Original
