Quotes by Philosophers - Page 116

One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
Alain de Botton
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Celia Green
To escape criticism - do nothing say nothing be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Be good to those who are good,and just to those who are not;this is true wisdom.Do good unto others,not expecting them to do good unto you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.
Muriel Barbery
Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
G.K. Chesterton
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
The world is like a board with holes in it and the square men have got into the round holes and the round into the square.
Bishop Berkeley
Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Noi siam venuti al loco ov'i' t'ho dettoche tu vedrai le genti dolorosec'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto.We to the place have come, where I have told theeThou shalt behold the people dolorousWho have foregone the good of intellect.
Dante Alighieri
A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Ayn Rand
There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fame is an island, and right before the castaway, the getaway of being known without being known.
Criss Jami
Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is blind, and therefore not responsible for whoever she bumps into.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If soul does not evolve it is dead... even if its body still breathes.
T.F. Hodge
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?
Michel Foucault
Seeing everything that goes on in your daily life, your daily activities - when you pick up a pen, when you talk, when you go out for a drive or when you are walking alone in the woods - can you with one breath, with one look, know yourself very simply as you are? When you know yourself as you are, then you understand the whole structure of man's endeavour, his deceptions, his hypocrisies, his search. To do this you must be tremendously honest with yourself throughout your being.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)
Søren Kierkegaard
Opportunities, like roses, come with a beautiful fragrance, but also with thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Life is a dream. We wake up when we die
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society
Bertrand Russell
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.
George Santayana
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]
Alfred North Whitehead
It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.
John Cage
Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta.Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern.
Emil M. Cioran
...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
Will Durant
Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .
Marcus Aurelius
The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.
Sri Aurobindo
It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands new undertakings and new forms of expression.
Eric Hoffer
Scriassine studied me in turn. "You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.
Simone de Beauvoir
Your eyes will always be closer to your soul than to any other part of your body except the heart.
Sorin Cerin
You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We've lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine.
André Gorz
If I knew ... that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life.
Henry David Thoreau
You should not honor men more than truth.
Plato
The clearest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
Michel de Montaigne
We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.
Alan W. Watts
In light, there is no darkness; and in darkness, there is no light.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Logic, when used correctly and by an intellect that is not corrupted by the lower passions, may lead to one to the Transcendent itself.
Osman Bakar
The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.
Alan W. Watts
If the past could be changed, it would not exist. If the future could be stopped, it would not survive. If the present could be avoided, it would not prevail.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
Marshall McLuhan
Our thoughts, feelings and whereabouts: Food we dish up on plates called photographs and status updates; to feed Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; beasts with insatiable appetites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thirty spokesShare one hub.Make the nothing therein appropriate, and you will have the use of the cart.
Lao Tzu
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
Ayn Rand
We are generally treated based on how much or little we have, earn, or know—or seem to have, earn, or know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Atheism is not against god, it is against the religious establishment who use god they have never seen or heard from to establish their influence over the minds of men.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Atât de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răspândește de la sine.
Umberto Eco
You cannot build an empire hands folded.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
I still believe that many Americans have a deep longing for that glorious moment when a sermon is more Biblical than American.
Criss Jami
Perception can be one-sided or variant: "Glass half empty or half full." There usually is more than one way of perceiving. Thoroughly check your inner dialogue.
T.F. Hodge
Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.
Plato
Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.
Rebecca Goldstein
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert Camus
Sunglasses are more useful to a blind man than freedom of speech is to a man who does not think for himself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.
Bruce Lee
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
Voltaire