Quotes by Philosophers - Page 102

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
Blaise Pascal
As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
Sam Harris
There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The pride of man hopes but to blame God for the evils of the world, and to praise himself for the good.
Criss Jami
Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice
Marcus Tullius Cicero
If you wish to transform, pretend this day until it is so.
T.F. Hodge
Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things man will not find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
Confucius
... no sensitive Christian can be satisfied with a distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness drawn only between communities, with each individual belonging unambiguously on one or the other side of the line. The behavior of "the righteous" is often very disappointing, while "the unrighteous" regularly perform in a manner that is much better than our theology might lead us to expect of them. Thus the need for a perspective that allows for both a rather slow process of sanctification in the Christian life and some sort of divine restraint on the power of sin in the unbelieving community. These theological adjustments to a religious perspective that might otherwise betray strong Manichean tones provide us with yet another reason for openness to a broad-ranging dialogue: Christians have good grounds for believing that their own weakness can be corrected by encountering the strengths of others.
Richard J. Mouw
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.
Edmund Husserl
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life
Immanuel Kant
Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Iris Murdoch
If there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.
Plato
The willing, Destiny guides them. The unwilling, Destiny drags them.
Seneca
Scars mean you fought. Wrinkles mean you lived. Heartache means you loved.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don't have to reach for the stars if you are already shining like one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that?
Bonaventure
We are only different because there exists something to be different from, and it is this difference that bonds us.
Chris Matakas
The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.
Richard M. Weaver
Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
Susan Sontag
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile a kind look a heartfelt compliment and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone.
Christopher Langan
It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one.
Plato
Energy is the inherent capacity of the universe to make matter exist.
Kedar Joshi
Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.
Augustine of Hippo
A leader learned to follow, and serves the followers who are learning to lead. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and in a sense tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm
I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.
Baruch Spinoza
Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the conscious falls into the unconscious you fall into a coma, and if the unconscious falls into the conscious and becomes conscious itself, you become enlightened, you become a Buddha, a Sosan.
Osho
Temporary failure will not prevent you from achieving lasting success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.
Cicero
The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.
Aristotle
Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.
Jostein Gaarder
If your heart truly stops when she looks at you, how come you are still alive?
Matshona Dhliwayo
Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life—if indeed we can conceive of it. Yet we have no indication that even Jesus was constantly awash with revelations as to what he should do. His union with the Father was so great that he was at all times obedient. This obedience was something that rested in his mature will and understanding of his life before God, not on always being told “Now do this” and “Now do that” with regard to every details of his life or work.
Dallas Willard
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.
Voltaire
Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?
Arthur Schopenhauer
He who despises a poor man’s wisdom has turned away great riches.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Jean-Yves Leloup
To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.
Auberon Herbert
In leadership, the way up is down. Serve before you get served
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Bait, no matter how big, is useless if fish don’t want it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I can think of no more worthwhile aim than pursuing mastery in this craft while transcending one’s own limitations.
Chris Matakas
The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton
I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness insidethat holds whatever we want.We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner spacethat makes it livable.We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
Lao Tzu
Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions, and learn to determine the value of your individual and collective action, however directed on material ends, in the light of the ideal which you are supposed to represent. Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.
Muhammad Iqbal
Those who would give us equal opportunity for everybody are threatened by it. They are afraid to lose their privileged positions. They pay lip service to it, they act by half measures and do everything to violate the laws they have themselves instituted to make sure the high class is always high. It never changes, it always goes in a circle, when the oppressed fight and get to the top, and they become the new elite and forget the promises.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I'm an atheist.[Letter to Max Otto]
John Dewey
A bird in a nest is secure, but that is not why God gave it wings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
José Ortega y Gasset
How alone everyone is in the vast tomb of the universe!
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
[T]he success of democracy depends, in the end, on the reliability of the judgments we citizens make, and hence upon our capacity and determination to weigh arguments and evidence rationally.
Irving M. Copi
The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.
Mark Fisher