Philosophy Quotes: What good is philosophy?

"Character is fate"
--Heraclitis

"Of all the pursuits open to men, the search for wisdom is most perfect, more sublime, more profitable, and more full of joy."
--Aquinas

"When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any"
--Kant

"For a philosopher, there is more grass growing down in the green valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, (Culture and Value, p80)

For a collection of quotes by living philosophers, see Steve Pyke's book of photograpghs *Philosophers*. My favourite (for its rudeness, rather than its insight) is HLA Hart's:

"To be frank, I think the idea of a 50-100 summary [of what philosophy is] is an absurd idea ... I advise you to drop it."

William James says:

a Philosopher is a blind man searching a black cat in a dark room where there is not cat
--(quoted from memory, you will find it in his _Some Problems of Philosophy_, chapt. 1)

Goethe, Faust I, has a satirical description of a speculating person, which I can't quote in English, but you will find it easily.

David Hume, _Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding ..., Oxford 1975, Sect. 1, '4:

a philosopher "purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours"

Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik (Gesamtausgbe 9, Frankfurt 1976, p. 122):

As long the human being exists in some way philosophy happens (my translation of: Sofern der Mensch existiert, geschieht in gewisser Weise das Philosophieren.

If you and your audience read German, you might like to quote the following aphorism on Philosophers:

"Zunft: Mundwerkschaft. Mitglieder: Meisterdenker und Mundwerksburshen. Ideal: Philosophisches Maulheldentum. Es gibt in dieser Zunft Systemkonstrukteure, analytische Sprachbeschauer, existentielle Problemmueller, Geschichtsgraeber, Kanonkonservatoren und Begriffsbuerokraten."
--Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann: _Sinn-Welten, Welten-Sinn_, Frankfurt(Suhrkamp) 1992, p. 55.

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions.
Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and give them sharp boundaries.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.112 [1922]

The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 119 [1953]

The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an Illness.
--Ibid, 255

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.
--Ibid, 309

The solution of philosophical problems can be compared with a gift in a fairy tale: in the magic castle it appears enchanted and if you look at it outside in daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort).
--(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 11)

Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more a working on oneself. On one's interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)
--(Culture and Value, 16)

In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.
--(Culture and Value, 34)

"What therefore is philosophy today any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitues its highest good."
-- (from _The Problems of Philosophy_)

Spinoza:

I foprget how this sentence begins, but it ends with "neither to laugh, nor to weep. but to understand." and the beginning makes this in effect the outcome of thinking philosophically about the world.

Has anybody sent you Bertrand Russell's quote:

"Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously"

Heidegger, Being and Time (MacQuarrie trans, p.262):

"The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems." One might want to paraphrase (or add a parenthetical gloss)"Dasein" as "human nature" or some such for a wider audience

Heidegger:

"Philosophy is expected to promote and even accelerate - to make easier as it were - the practical and technical business of culture. But - it is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only more difficult. And this is not merely because its language strikes the everyday understanding as strange if not insane. Rather, it is the authentic function of philosophy to challenge human beings in their historical situation and hence, in the last analysis being pure and simple. Philosophy restores to things, to beings, their weight. How so? Because the challenge is one of the essential prerequisites for the birth of all greatness. We can speak of historical destiny only where an authentic knowledge of things dominates man's being in this world. And it is philosophy that opens up the paths and perspectives of such knowledge". [collected by Joe Lau for the philosop mailing list]