Quotations and cartoons about philosophy and thinking

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
William James

"I dined at Rufin's, where [Casanova], an Italian, wanted to shine as a great philosopher, and accordingly doubted of his existence and of everything else. I thought him a blockhead..."
James Boswell, in his diary of 1764

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, most do." 
Bertrand Russell

“Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his all duty is to think as he ought” Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) Pensees

“Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy, be still a man.”
David Hume

"There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy'..."
Alain de Botton in an interview in The Independent, 27/3/09

"Philosophy begins in wonder, and when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."
A N Whitehead

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

John Locke described his efforts as a philosopher as those of an "underlabourer... removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of our knowledge."
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

"Our life and our person are not made of reason alone, and the more we are aware of this fact, the better it is. But reason is the only tool we have for bringing a ray of light and order into the great, dark chaos from which we were born, into which we shall return, and by which we are surrounded on all sides."  
Paul Oskar Kristeller

“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.”
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Philosophy is “thinking about thinking”.
Aristotle

"Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean that it means anything."
James Monaco in "How to Read a Film"  [or, of course, it might - and philosophical enquiry can try to discover what.]

"Philosophy leaves everything as it is."
Wittgenstein

"The cultural role of philosophy is not to deliver truth but to build the spirit of truth and this means: never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense, always to suspect that there might be 'another side' in what we take for granted, and never to allow us to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science."
Leszek Kolakowski in Modernity on Endless Trial