Philosophy Quote API

A free, maintained JSON API for philosophy quotes in five languages: English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. More than 1,600 quotes from 63 thinkers, from Heraclitus and Confucius to Simone de Beauvoir, with well-known misattributions filtered out. No key, CORS enabled.

Quote of the day

GET https://sagius.app/api/v1/quote-of-the-day?lang=fr

The same quote for everyone per UTC day. Cached for an hour at the edge.

{
  "date": "2026-09-24",
  "quote": {
    "id": 115087,
    "text": "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.",
    "author": "Seneca",
    "authorSlug": "seneca",
    "lang": "en",
    "url": "https://sagius.app/daily"
  },
  "attribution": { "text": "Quotes by Sagius", "url": "https://sagius.app", "required": "Free to use with a visible link to https://sagius.app" }
}

Random quote

GET https://sagius.app/api/v1/quotes/random?lang=de&author=seneca

author is optional (a slug such as seneca, marcusaurelius, confucius, simone-de-beauvoir). Limited to 60 requests per minute per IP.

Terms

• Free for personal and commercial use.
• Show a visible link to sagius.app wherever the quotes appear (“Quotes by Sagius”).
• Translations are Sagius’s own; don’t republish the corpus as a dataset (use our open dataset for that: philosopher quotes dataset).
• Found a wrong attribution? Tell us and we’ll retire it.

Browser new tab

The same API powers the Sagius New Tab extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox: one quote a day, no permissions, no tracking.