Quotes by Philosophers - Page 119

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emil M. Cioran
God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion!
D.T. Suzuki
If you know the why, you can live any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They were a remarkable company, each one of them a unique person, yet characterized to some extent by his particular national type. And all were distinctively “scientists” of the period. Formerly this would have implied a rather uncritical leaning towards materialism, and an affectation of cynicism; but by now it was fashionable to profess an equally uncritical belief that all natural phenomena were manifestations of the cosmic mind. In both periods, when a man passed beyond the sphere of his own serious scientific work he chose his beliefs irresponsibly, according to his taste, much as he chose his recreation or his food.
Olaf Stapledon
Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.
Ivan Illich
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G.K. Chesterton
I cared not a whit whether Time were “a form of thought,” or an aspect of reality, or (this was later) compoundable with Space. What I wanted to know was: How it got mixed?
J.W. Dunne
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.
Slavoj Žižek
Your body is made of two things: your will to do, your ego, and the physical form you have received from the prakriti, the nature. If the will to do is present within you, then the nature will go on providing you with an appropriate body. This is how you have been born again and again. Sometimes you were an animal, sometimes a bird, a tree some other time, and sometimes a man. Whatsoever you wished to achieve, it has happened. Your desire to achieve becomes the actuality; thoughts become real things. So beware when you desire, because all desires are fulfilled – sooner or later.If you are of the habit of watching the birds fly in the sky and wonder, ”How free the birds are, I wish I were a bird.” it will not be long before you become a bird. You see dogs mating, and if that moment a thought arises in you, ”What freedom! What happiness!” – soon you will become a dog. Whatever desire you keep within you, it becomes a seed.
Osho
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Henry David Thoreau
By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurl'd Here once the embattl'd farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.
Plato
Time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
Aldous Huxley
The difficult problems in life always start off being simple. Great affairs always start off being small.
Lao Tzu
The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.
G.K. Chesterton
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.
Ayn Rand
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
Remember, whenever you have two things, two alternatives, choose the new one, choose the harder, choose the one in which more awareness will be needed.
Osho
God wants us to humbly and sincerely ask him things. How often do you enjoy people talking about you without taking the time to get to know you?
Criss Jami
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley
If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted.
Stefan Molyneux
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.
Francis Bacon
The best most beautiful and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.
Jonathan Edwards
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir
When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellant, but I could no longer find them.
Sri Aurobindo
We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living
Tom Chatfield
the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.
Martin Cohen
Great thoughts come from the heart.
Vauvenargues
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them, and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.
Niccolò Machiavelli
We are reformers in spring and summer in autumn and winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night. Reform is affirmative conservatism negative conservatism goes for comfort reform for truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Ludwig Feuerbach
The reason you don't succeed in life is because you are too lenient with your deadly enemies. Identify them and eradicate them completely, don't let any of their seed escape your vengeful sword. Don't negotiate with the enemy and never make deals with them. Only after you have wiped them out of the map will success smile at you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...
Oswald Spengler
What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
Friedrich A. Hayek
It was the merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. Take, for example, a ball or an egg: we can see their shapes at a glance. Yet suppose that instead of the impression made on our eye by an aggregate of white points forming the surface of an egg, we were presented with another, logically equivalent, presentation of these points as given by a list of their spatial co-ordinate values. It would take years of labour to discover the shape inherent in this aggregate of figures - provided it could be guessed at all. The perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system.
Michael Polanyi
Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it.
Clancy Martin
What is it that makes you cry? It is only your attachments. What is it that you miss when it is lost? It is the object of your attachment. Ponder over this. Find out what it is that grips your very life, without which you feel miserable and destitute; that is the center of your attachment. Here is what you should do: make an effort to find out what things it would hurt you to lose. Then, before they are lost, open your hands little by little, relax your grip on them. This is the method for conquering attachment. There is bound to be pain, but you must bear it; this is your penance. It is not necessary to renounce anything. It is not that you should leave your wife and run away to the Himalayas. Remain there, where you are, but gradually stop depending on her. There is no need to cause any pain; your wife need not even know it. There is no need to tell her.Seek out the attachments. Try gradually to live without the things that you now think you cannot live without. Create such a state within yourself that if and when these things are lost, there is not the slightest tremor within you. Then you will have attained victory over these attachments. This can be possible. It has been possible. And if it has happened to even one, it can happen to all.
Osho
Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.
John Mark Reynolds
William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.
G.K. Chesterton
Eating a salad (in public) is an overweight person’s attempt to appear in control.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist.
Chris Matakas
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
Marcus Aurelius
Discovery of one’s self, of one’s specific individual powers and potential capacities, learning how to develop them and use them as a socialized human being that cares about the needs of other individuals—would have to become the primary task of a new humanist education.
Mihailo Markovic
Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.
Liezi
If now we attend to ourselves on occasion of any transgression of duty, we shall find that we in fact do not will that our maxim should be universal law, for that is impossible for us; on the contrary, we will that the opposite should remain a universal law, only we assume the liberty of making an exception in our own favor or (just for this time only) in favor of our inclination. Consequently, if we considered all cases from one and the same point of view, namely, that of reason, we should find a contradiction in our own will, namely, that a certain principle should be objectively necessary as a universal law, and yet subjectively should not be universal, but admit of exceptions. As, however, we at one moment regard our action from the point of view of a will wholly conformed to reason, and then again look at the same action from the point of view of a will affected by inclination, there is not really any contradiction, but an antagonism of inclination to the precept of reason, whereby the universality of the principle is changed into mere generality, so that the practical principle of reason shall meet the maxim half way. Now, although this cannot be justified in our own impartial judgement, yet it proves that we do really recognize the validity of the categorical imperative and (with all respect for it) only allow ourselves a few exceptions which we think unimportant and forced from us.
Immanuel Kant
Education costs an arm and a leg, but ignorance costs you your mind and your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Philologists assure us that żulm in Arabic originally meant "to put something out of its proper place," so that all wrong of any kind is injustice, i.e., an injustice against the agent himself) is, therefore, a very common term in the Qur’ān, with its clear idea that all injustice is basically reflexive.
Fazlur Rahman
Don't be alarmed, the god I am trying to kill is the one I hate, not the one I love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.
Ayn Rand
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
Albert Camus
Courage is sustained by calling up anew the vision of the goal.
A. G. Sertillanges
Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
Dallas Willard
It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.
Peter Kreeft
I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?
Criss Jami
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
Voltaire