15 Underrated Philosophical Quotes That Deserve More Attention

Dec 12

Written By Michele Edington (formerly Michele Gargiulo)

My husband, Zakary Edington, absolutely adores philosophy. He often goes down the rabbit hole and really loves philosophers that aren’t as well known or studied. This post is inspired by him.

Most people know the big, shiny philosophical quotes, you know, the ones printed on posters, stitched onto tote bags, or repeated online until their edges have worn thin. Besides those though, there are other lines, that sit in the shadowed corners of philosophy. These sit quietly in the background, waiting for someone to come along and pluck them like weeds, then realize they’re actually flowers.

These are some of the quotes that changed me, that made me slow down for just a minute, and made me see the world at a slightly different angle, like the way sunlight sneaks through a half-closed curtain when you’re trying to sleep and transforms a room without even trying.

Here are 15 of the most underrated philosophical quotes, each one a small key to a hidden door in life experience.

“We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.” — Rumi

I know this one made me sit and think for literally weeks after I read it. We spend so much of our lives searching, for meaning, for success, for a sign we’re on the right path, for things to get better, for so very many things. We chase stars, mentors, awards, grants, and whole galaxies of validation, but Rumi’s quieter quote reminds us that what we’re often trying to uncover out there is a reflection of something glowing quietly in here.

I long for wonder because I am wonder. We chase beauty because beauty is already threaded through our ribcage and we like to see parallels in nature so we don’t feel as lonely. I believe we reach outward only to find that everything we touched had already been hidden inside us.

This quote is the antidote to feeling incomplete, it’s proof that the universe isn’t something we enter, it’s something we already are.

“You are not separate from the universe; you are part of it. The distinction is in your mind.” — Alan Watts

We tend to talk about “the universe” like it’s a distant landlord overseeing our lease on existence. Something separate and larger than us, but also somehow not us. We also like to tell ourselves that we don’t really matter in the whole big scheme of the universe, that we’re just a tiny little piece that doesn’t change anything.

Watts breaks that illusion in six seconds.

You are literally not observing the universe, you’re the universe experiencing itself through your eyes. Your heartbeat is a small percussion echoing the rhythm of stars, your thoughts are chemical stardust attempting to remember where it came from. Your life is not a visitor here, it’s a continuation of what once was.

The separation is mental, while the unity is real. You are changing the entire universe just by being in it.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen

Everyone quotes this line, so you might’ve heard of it before, but strangely, it doesn’t look like anyone analyzes it deeply.

Cohen isn’t saying imperfection is acceptable, he’s saying imperfection is absolutely necessary.

The cracks in us that form when life is a little more rough than we want it to be from either the heartbreaks, the traumas, the disappointments, or the internal earthquakes, they aren’t defects. They’re openings and entry points, places where life can slip through and soften us in ways that are more beautiful than we could’ve imagined.

Light doesn’t pour into the pristine, it pours into the broken.

Healing isn’t about sealing the crack at all, it’s about learning to glow through it.

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

This is one of the truest psychological observations ever written, and one I feel so personally it reverberates in my bones. I sleep like dog-shit (sorry for the language). I’ve been diagnosed with insomnia and night-terrors since my trauma, and I often go days (sometimes even weeks) on around 3 hours per day. I’ve written about this at length, but your mind gets weird on too little sleep.

Think of how anxiety resurfaces after weeks of calm or how old insecurities return long after you thought you’d outgrown them. These memories are suddenly so sharp again at 2 a.m. I’ve literally had nights where I lay there and think of every cring-worthy thing I’ve done in life before.

Nietzsche saw this almost 150 years before neuroscience described it. When our mental defenses weaken through exhaustion or stress, old patterns rise again. It’s not because we failed, but because biology takes up old weapons in moments of weakness.

This quote is a mercy for yourself in those moments. It tells you that you’re not regressing, you’re just tired. Exhaustion is a far gentler thing to forgive than everything you did wrong in your entire life.

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it useful.” — Lao Tzu

Ahh, this one cuts me deep. We live in a world that praises what you can see and show on social media. The material, the measurable, the fillable is all that’s ever shoved in your face. Lao Tzu looks at a pot and sees the wisdom most of us miss, that the real value is in the space, the room to breathe.

This is a philosophy of minimalism, but also a philosophy of boundaries.
You are shapely, beautiful, structured clay, but your true usefulness comes from the parts you protect.
Your gaps, your silence, your ability to say “no” makes you more valuable than the design you show the world.

We are taught to feel guilty for emptiness, but sometimes emptiness is the gift. It’s also not what everyone else sees that’s the value, but what you build behind your mask and facade that really holds the worth.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” — Ian Maclaren

This quote gets circulated, but it’s actually rarely understood.

Maclaren wasn’t writing about surface-level kindness, he was writing about the kind that requires imagination. The kind that assumes people are wounded in ways you cannot see.

Every smile has a shadow, and every confident step has a history.
Every rude person is protecting a bruise you don’t know about, which is why they’re lashing out. This quote is not permission to tolerate cruelty, but an invitation to soften where you can. Because life is difficult enough without adding unnecessary sharpness.

After my trauma, you wouldn’t believe the nasty things people said to me. I even had strangers on the internet reach out to place blame at my feet or tell me I should kill myself. I never once reacted emotionally toward them, instead I spoke calmly with them and I apologized for what they were going through and I wished them well before I blocked them.

On my lowest days I regret that, but most of the time, I’m actually very proud of how I handled it.

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” — John Lubbock

A really simple sentence to read, but it collapses perception theory into a single statement.

Two people can walk down the same street and see entirely different worlds…in fact, all of us do. The anxious person sees danger lurking in the shadows while the artist sees beauty in it.
The entrepreneur sees opportunity in every failure and the lonely person sees indifference in every passing face.

Your world is not built from what exists, it’s built from what you notice.

This is a reminder that attention is a creative force and whatever you look for, you water. Learn to train your mind to observe the good or whatever it is you’re looking for, and it’ll actually find its way to you.

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” — Voltaire

This one hits like a slap of cold water in the face when you are least expecting it.

Voltaire isn’t accusing (even if it feels like it), he’s awakening.
He’s pointing toward moral responsibility, the cost of inaction, and the weight of silence when helping would have been easy. It’s a provocative reminder that goodness isn’t just about actively avoiding harm, but also about choosing to take action when action is possible.

This world rewards self-focus above all else, this quote is a compass pointing outward.

“You must have chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.” — Nietzsche

This is the most beautiful defense of inner turbulence ever written, and it sits so close to my heart it isn’t even funny.

Your messiness, your passions, fears, contradictions, restless nights, all of it is not a flaw. It’s an engine, creativity isn’t born from perfect serenity, it’s born from the friction inside you.

The star only appears because something wild needed to erupt. Some days after my trauma I truly believed my mind was broken. I told people there was “swirling chaos” and I couldn’t think right anymore. This quote is one that saved me. My obsession with the stars and my own mind and soul feeling like absolute turmoil was winning for years drew me to the beauty of this quote. I wanted to create a dancing star and it really pushed me to keep going when I just wanted to collapse in on myself.

If you feel chaotic right now, Nietzsche is telling you good, that means something luminous is trying to be born.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

Seneca wrote this 2,000 years before psychology gave us terms like catastrophizing, negative bias, or anticipatory anxiety, but it really sums them up pretty well.

Your brain evolved to predict danger, not happiness. Fear is sticky, that’s why the news makes millions of dollars and they’re telling you how horrible everything is all the time. Possibility is slippery, so those ideas and things don’t get the attention they deserve.

Most of our worst pain isn’t even in the moment, it’s in the anticipation.

Seneca’s reminder is grounding, what you feel may not be what really is. Your brain can trick you into living in storms that never arrive, don’t let it. You’re the one with the power to fixate on the positives or the negatives, no one else can do that for you. Like my dad used to tell me when I told him I was unhappy, “you can be happy or you can be sad, you pick.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

Frankl survived the unimaginable, he was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, he lost his pregnant wife, his parents, and his brother to the camps. He endured starvation, forced labor, the constant threat of death, and the systematic stripping away of his own identity. When he wrote about freedom, he wasn’t imagining some metaphor, he was speaking from the true core of resilience.

Sometimes something happens, maybe it’s an insult or a setback or a fear, and your mind wants to react instantly. The hard truth of it is that between the moment and your reaction is a sliver of choice.

Wait for a pause, just a little breath. Inside that moment is freedom and control, more so than lashing out in any sort of emotional way.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.” — Heraclitus

Change is the only constant in this life, and yet we love to resist it more than anything.

The river flows and we flow, both the world around us and ourselves are in perpetual motion, never slowing, always a casualty of time.

You cannot return to who you were. I’m sorry if that stings, I know in the past that was like a slap in the face to me, but it’s the hard truth. That is not the tragedy you make it out to be, it’s an evolution.

Each day, the water is different, every day, you are different. The river isn’t meant to stay still and neither are you. Embrace change as it comes, and know that it will come back again and again in this life.

“We live on the edge of the miraculous.” — Henry Miller

What a strange and delicate musing. I’m not sure if it’s the artistic soul of mine or the sleep-deprived monster that lives in my body, but this one taps into something primitive in me.
We don’t live in the miraculous, we live on the edge of it. As if the extraordinary is always just slightly out of reach, brushing against our daily routines like a gentle passing breeze.

This quote reminds us that the magical isn’t scarce, it’s subtle. Magic doesn’t announce itself, it waits for you to sharpen your senses, to look up from your phone, and to pay attention to the texture of existence.

Life is always whispering, we just forget to listen, or decided to put our earbuds in.

“All the harm in the world comes from not knowing how to sit still in a room.” — Blaise Pascal

Long before TikTok and the doom-scroll, Pascal diagnosed humanity’s greatest weakness: we cannot be alone with ourselves. I know at least three people in my life who chatter in silence and can’t sit still long enough for me to make them a cup of tea. Sometimes they even tell the same story more than once in an effort to fill the void.

Distraction is a refuge for those of us who are still hiding, and silence is confrontation. Stillness is a calm pond that reflects back at us, sometimes it’s easier to splash around instead of looking.

The modern world has turned restlessness into a business model, and Pascal’s observation feels almost prophetic now. Our inability to sit quietly has birthed chaos both socially and emotionally.

This quote is not about being idle, it’s about being present.

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — Eden Phillpotts

Henry Miller touched on this a little, but this is another variation that I truly love. This is my favorite because it places responsibility on the observer, on us.

The world is already miraculous (we sit on the edge of it, don’t forget), but the limitation isn’t outside, it’s in our perception.

If you could sharpen your senses suddenly the sky becomes a cathedral or leaves have personalities. People glow with their own private constellations all the time, we’re just too busy to notice or look around at all. Life feels textured and dimensional again if you just look around at it.

The magic was never hiding, our dullness was.

Philosophy really isn’t meant to be memorized, it’s meant to be absorbed into our souls and applied to our daily lives. These quotes aren’t rules, they’re invitations, each one asks you to lean in, to question what you’ve been told, and to awaken something sleeping inside you.

That’s why the underrated quotes matter most, they haven’t been hollowed out by repetition, they still feel wild and alive.