Quotes by Philosophers - Page 121

He (God) reveals himself to the pure heart.
Swami Vivekananda
Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.
Seneca
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conscience is the manifestation of our divine nature, the absolute truthfulness that we all have inside, that resides beyond the instinctive desire to survive.
Ilchi Lee
Work banishes those three great evils boredom vice and poverty.
Voltaire
Only those means of security are good are certain are lasting that depend on yourself and your own vigor.
Niccolò Machiavelli
When peace has thoroughly permeated our brain, mind, and body, we can create it as our reality. I firmly believe that every person is a peacemaker, once thy have developed their self-awareness and creativity. Peace must not be left to government leaders or gurus. It must spring from the brains, hands, and minds of the people.
Ilchi Lee
Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
Confucius
Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
Marcus Aurelius
Everybody is born creative, but very few people remain creative.
Osho
One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.
Jeremy Bentham
Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, "Why?
Thomas Cathcart
Don't you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it? Such was the high opinion it had of its talents.
Zhuangzi
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious--for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: "Oh, but you forget the good God." Apparently they conceive of the Deity add a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.
Bertrand Russell
Your breaking point is often your blessing point.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Suppose that we believe that in 200 years, people would be prepared to pay a million dollars (that's in today's dollars, not inflated ones) to be able to have an unspoilt valley. Now imagine that today we can profit by cutting down the forest in the valley, which will never regrow. If we apply an annual discount rate of 5 percent, compounded exponentially, how big would that profit have to be to justify the loss of a million dollars in 2210? The answer, surprisingly, is just sixty dollars! That's all that a million dollars in 200 years is worth, at that rate of discount. Obviously, then, if we use a 5 percent discount rate, values gained one thousand years in the future scarcely count at all. This is not because of any uncertainty about whether there will be human beings or other sentient creatures inhabiting this planet at that time, but merely because of the compounding effect of the rate of return on money invested now.
Peter Singer
It is like the thirsty traveller who at first sincerely sought the water of knowledge, but who later, having found it plain perhaps, proceeded to temper his cup with the salt of doubt so that his thirst now becomes insatiable though he drinks incessantly, and that in thus drinking the water that cannot slake his thirst, he has forgotten the original and true purpose for which the water was sought.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
An ounce of wisdom can earn you a ton of gold.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The materialists, or some of them, would have us believe that the brain produces thoughts as an organ secretes fluids; this is to overlook What constitutes the very essence of thought, namely the materially unexplainable miracle of subjectivity: as if the cause of consciousness - immaterial and non-spatial by definition - could be a material object.
Frithjof Schuon
Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.
Elbert Hubbard
A tapping foot isn’t the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bitter love is better than sweet hate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Transcend your doubts.Transcend your fears.Transcend your weaknesses.Transcend your limits.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All the roads of life end in death.
Sorin Cerin
Boredom is rage spread thin.
Paul Tillich
If free will means to do what you want, then it does not exist. Many of its staunchest proponents have met the wheel of fate without opposing it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The question is whether suicide is the way out or the way in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who do not possess the humility to ask real scholars and theologians its difficult questions. There is little doubt that the atheist has the bigger imagination: the first reason is due to his persistent caricatures of what constitutes a Christian; the second because of his belief that most of his questions are actually rhetorical. From this I can infer that, instead of laughing at one another (the Christian at modern atheist immaturity and the modern atheist at Christian stupidity), we would have a better chance at productivity laughing with one another as we all dumb down what we don't understand.
Criss Jami
In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Your mind can help you do the unimaginable.Your hands can help you get the unattainable.Your heart can help you accomplish the unachievable.Your soul can help you create the inconceivable.Your God can help you achieve the unthinkable.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
Bruce Lee
A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.
Josef Pieper
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
Ayn Rand
The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...
Louis de la Forge
For our face and body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straigth and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.
Ayn Rand
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Rich men use most of their money to get richer. Poor men use most of their money to look richer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.
Pascal Bruckner
How can I know these trees, how can I know you, how can I know the other if I myself am unknown to me, if I am myself ignorant; when I do not know who I am.
Osho
It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls “a mutation of Spirit.” A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man.
Schwaller de Lubicz
The more I see of other countries the more I love my own.
Mme. De Stael
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...
John Stuart Mill
It is interesting, in this context, to think again of our earlier argument that membership of the species Homo sapiens does not entitle a being to better treatment than a being at a similar mental level who is a member of a different species. We could also have said – except that it seemed too obvious to need saying – that membership of the species Homo sapiens is not a reason for giving a being worse treatment than a member of a different species. Yet in respect of euthanasia, this needs to be said. If your dog is ill and in pain with no chance of recovery, the humane thing to do is take her to the vet, who will end her suffering swiftly with a lethal injection. To ‘allow nature to take its course’, withholding treatment while your dog dies slowly and in distress over days, weeks or months, would obviously be wrong. It is only our misplaced respect for the doctrine of the sanctity of human life that prevents us from seeing that what it is obviously wrong to do to a dog, it is equally wrong to do to a human being who has never been able to express a view about such matters.
Peter Singer
In a crowd do not lose your individuality, and in your individuality do not lose the crowd.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Even though artists of all kinds claim to put their hearts and souls into their works, it will only confuse you, for example, if you try to discern a painter by his paintings. His masterpiece may be the master because of its iridescence; it may display a hundred different perspectives through his single face.
Criss Jami
I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others.
Marcus Aurelius
Be the calm in someone else’s storm.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."..."There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."..."But they used to take morphia and cocaine."..."Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."..."Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."..."Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."..."All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."..."Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."..."Stability was practically assured.
Aldous Huxley
Make your own luck, and then share it with others.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Sin is looking for the right thing in the wrong place.
Augustine of Hippo
Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.
G.K. Chesterton
Love is always based on self-interest
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?
Maurice Blanchot
If you are too busy to love, you are too busy to live; if you are too busy to live, you are too busy to love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What can a man do with music who is not benevolent?
Confucius
All religions are guesswork
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Jiu Jitsu gives each of us something that no other sport can. We have the opportunity to become truly great regardless of what circumstance fate has handed us. We have complete freedom and responsibility to achieve whatever level of mastery we wish.
Chris Matakas
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar
Henry David Thoreau