Note that the context matters a ton in understanding these quotes. Words get their meaning from the text. Anyway, here they are:
Most important, I could spend my time testing and examining people there, as I do here, as to who among them is wise, and who thinks he is, but is not.
Plato, Apology
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
The Bible, Ecclesiastes
“Was that — life?” I want to say to death. “Well then! One More Time!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them?
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will as thing in itself.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 2)
The horror! The horror!
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The rest is silence.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Out, out, brief candle!
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
We, however, are interested in objective truth rather than philosophical anthropology.
James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollok
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
Albert Camus, The Stranger
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean — so Bunbury died.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
What one is your favorite? Tell me below.
Before you call me out on grammar, I know that the superlative of profound is "profoundest"––but what a mouthful! If "most profound" get my point across, why bother?