Quotes by Philosophers - Page 111

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Aldous Huxley
The illusion, as ego suggests, is that it's about time - mechanical mind; it is not. It is, however, all about conscious space - something [the] soul has always known.
T.F. Hodge
There is nothing that is going to make people hate you more, and love you more, than telling the truth.
Stefan Molyneux
If God charged us for every tear He shed for us, the world would be bankrupt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.
Alain de Botton
Art is a delayed echo.
George Santayana
And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.
Frédéric Gros
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
Albert Camus
Be the sun in someone’s dark sky.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.
Plato
... A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Max Weber
Killing people in the name of religion does not make it religious.
Youssef Ziedan
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
Henry David Thoreau
When you arise in the moring, think of what a precious privelege it is to be alive-- to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love
Marcus Aurelius
Liberty is the first condition of growth. It is wrong, a thousand times wrong, if any of you dares to say, 'I will work out the salvation of this woman or child.
Swami Vivekananda
Sages see further with their eyes closed than scholars with their eyes open.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Fear mediocrity,not failure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man- not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia.
Ortega y Gasset
Here, fire turns into water;Here, the dancing of the rain declares the sun.There's no opposition in existence, no contradiction;Everything supports everything else.
Osho
All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.
Amos Bronson Alcott
To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding.It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.
Jean Paul Richter
You only become truly rich the day you possess something that money cannot buy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Growing up I sometimes imagined that for Christ's return perhaps He would appear as 'Black Jesus' to white people and 'White Jesus' to black people just to screw with the racists.
Criss Jami
The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts... That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success... Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.
Jacques Ellul
For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
Thomas Hobbes
Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
G.K. Chesterton
Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.
Bertrand Russell
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
Faith is the summit of the Torah.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food.
Jonathan Wolff
Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as deathsquads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.
Noam Chomsky
Sometimes divorce is the best thing that can happen to marriage
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined
Henry David Thoreau
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies ... and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation to grow as they will by the roadside expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
William James
Heaven's net is wide, but its mesh is fine
Lao Tzu
Man is the only animal that can be bored.
Erich Fromm
Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.
Stefan Molyneux
Some women are good-looking … until they change their hairstyle.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
[A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.
George H. Smith
The child starts out by being attached to his mother as "the ground of all being." He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise, and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother. In the history of the human race we see—and can anticipate—the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.
Erich Fromm
There is no one who is completely evil as to lack some goodness in him.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey? But I am done with this creed of corruption. I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I.
Ayn Rand
My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
Be the spouse you wish to have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.
George Boole
Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders.
Erich Fromm
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.
Seneca
If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose.
Bertrand Russell
A timid person is frightened before a danger a coward during the time and a courageous person afterwards.
Jean Paul Richter
I do not see the value of separating humans into a body, soul and spirit. We don't do this with any other mammals, so why do we do it with ourselves? Thinking and fresh ideas arise naturally from the rhythm of one’s internal felt-sense. It is the process artists demonstrate to humanity—to express our individuality in real-time, as a living process, rather than a “copied” idea.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
From attraction and affectionCover of perfectionFailure beyond texture to a painful lessonEverything that was from the start wasn't from the heart
Criss Jami
...what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?
Bertrand Russell
Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them.
Jean Baudrillard
The weakest among us has a gift however seemingly trivial which is peculiar to him and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race.
John Ruskin
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confidence of their help.
Epicurus
Did I love what I was doing, or did I love myself in doing it?
C. Terry Warner
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;
Albert Camus
Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day.
Friedrich Nietzsche