Quotes by Philosophers - Page 110

It is on the canvass of the darkest storms that the brightest rainbows are painted.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Pearls from the soul are more precious than diamonds from the mine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A leaf has no power to resist when the wind blows, but when life’s storms rage, you do.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Albert Schweitzer
There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.
William Barrett
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Alain de Botton
Gravity is no match against one who is determined to reach the stars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There are not wings of dreams that have not previously dealt with the flight of black thoughts.
Sorin Cerin
He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.
Boethius
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.
Gaston Bachelard
A lifelong learner is a lifelong winner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Henry David Thoreau
Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.
Paul Brunton
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Bertrand Russell
But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves
Albert Camus
The soul's garden is watered by love's rivers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most important part of discernment is pinpointing the forces to be reckoned with, both the constructive and destructive.
Criss Jami
It is easier to forgive yourself of a thousand misdeeds than to forgive your enemy of one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.
Emil M. Cioran
Pleasure is the object duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
Voltaire
Ruin and recovery are both from within.
Epictetus
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Theodor W. Adorno
O sky above me, you modest, glowing sky! O you, my happiness before sunrise! Day is coming: so let us part!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
Maimonides
Don’t be confined by the self you have experienced, the self you know. Going beyond what you know and what you have experienced, challenge your brain with new questions and give it new tasks—then it will begin to manifest infinite creativity.
Ilchi Lee
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Thomas Carlyle
Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.
Erich Fromm
...There are also those who inadvertently grant power to another man's words by continuously trying to spite him. If a man gets to the point where he can simply say, 'The sky is blue,' and people indignantly rush up trying to refute him saying, 'No, the sky is light blue,' then, whether they realize it or not, he has become an authority figure even to such adversaries.
Criss Jami
Learn from the ocean; not fearing turbulence, it uses the wind against it to rise instead.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
Bertrand Russell
The whole of life but labours in the dark.For just as children tremble and fear allIn the viewless dark, so even we at timesDread in the light so many things that beNo whit more fearsome than what children feign,Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark.This terror then, this darkness of the mind,Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,But only nature's aspect and her law.
Titus Lucretius Carus
I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!
Mary Wollstonecraft
On the inside, the copycats of the ruffians are more delicate than the copycats of prudes.
Criss Jami
I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.
Criss Jami
The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn't been left to its own devices. A hundred years ago a certain Dior was dictating fashions in clothing. Today this sort of regulating has embraced all walks of life. If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn't want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescoping breasts, angel's wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step?
Stanisław Lem
No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.
David Hume
Doubt is not a pleasant state but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Why yes, I can,' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.
Ayn Rand
The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.
Laurens van der Post
Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.
Robert Musil
Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.
Iris Murdoch
Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.
Bruce Lee
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
Alain de Botton
Conflict is not unavoidable. However, it is nonsensical to consider the institution of a state as a solution to the problem of possible conflict, because it is precisely the institution of a state which first makes conflict unavoidable and permanent.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.
Hildegard of Bingen
In the end,The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go.
Lao Tzu
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
Voltaire
The inner imaginary universe of the human primate is the battlefield of the ages
Christopher Zzenn Loren
The creative person has to dissolve all should and should nots. He needs freedom and space, vast space; he needs the whole sky and all the stars. Only then can his innermost spontaneity start growing.
Osho
The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.
Henry David Thoreau
A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
Baltasar Gracián
You are the way and you are the goal, and there is no distance between you and the goal. You are the seeker and you are the sought; there is no distance between the seeker and the sought. You are the worshipper and you are the worshipped. You are the disciple and you are the master. You are the means and you are the end: this is the great way.
Osho
The succession of thoughts appears in time, but the gap between two of them is outside time. The gap itself is normally unobserved. The chance of enlightenment is missed.
Paul Brunton
Some people have the license to sin: Soldiers, to kill; politicians, writers, priests, businessmen, married man and women, to lie; and married couples to have sex
Bangambiki Habyarimana
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
Louis Althusser
A thousand things advance nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat that is progress.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
Peter Kreeft
Our religious systems have taught us to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) I couldn’t disagree more. How about, “feed a child what it needs, so when it gets grows up, it will “be” its own unique unpredictably creative self.
Christopher Zzenn Loren