Quotes by Philosophers - Page 114

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Søren Kierkegaard
In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things.
Blaise Pascal
Who can hide himself from death or who can embrace the wind?
Sorin Cerin
He who is happy in his hut is better than he who is miserable in his palace.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.
Blaise Pascal
An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.
Ayn Rand
Be happy when people envy you, you are on the right path
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Be flexible like trees; when the wind blows bend, but do not break.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In quarreling the truth is always lost.
Syrus
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Alain de Botton
Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.
Thomas Aquinas
You are the cause of your suffering. That means that you alone have the power to change it.
Shai Tubali
Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Jesus was not a carpenter forever.
Chris Matakas
Don’t tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.
Ayn Rand
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The purpose of the state is really freedom.
Baruch Spinoza
God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they're so empirically familiar with how atheists think.
Criss Jami
I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.
Charles Eisenstein
The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
Felix Adler
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity
Simone de Beauvoir
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?
José Ortega y Gasset
Why do people respect the package rather than the man?
Michel de Montaigne
In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know.
G.K. Chesterton
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Søren Kierkegaard
A VIP area is nothing without not-so-important people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened.
Albert Camus
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?
Ayn Rand
We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one
Voltaire
We die a day at a time
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valéry
Paying the price for your dreams proves you can afford them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Higher thoughts lead to a higher life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
From the sadness, learn something; from the happiness, learn something. From the setback, learn something and even from the success learn something. Never stop learning from any situation in life, for that is where the wisdom lies.
Gift Gugu Mona
The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
Michel de Montaigne
Some books are to be tasted others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
Democritus
Wish' is the most powerful thing in the world. Higher than God.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
Marcus Aurelius
Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.
Neel Burton
Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.
Hannah Arendt
Pleasure awakens the body, wisdom awakens the mind, joy awakens the heart, and love awakens the soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
Sam Harris
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
Blaise Pascal
Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".
Peter Kreeft
Courting is an activity where a man and a woman flaunt their virtues. Dating is an activity where life exposes the other’s vices.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
Sidney Hook
To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G.K. Chesterton
Pride and ego makes a mockery of an apology. Humility wins forgiveness without question...so break 'yo'self'!
T.F. Hodge
An anomaly has his own ambitions. You can try reasoning with him, but that's like using money to bribe a beast.
Criss Jami
Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Bertrand Russell
Future dreams distract you from present nightmares.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.
Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu