Quotes by Philosophers - Page 125

The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemitisation (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as citizen).
Michel Foucault
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant
The pen is mightier than the sword as long as it doesn't run out of ink.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The quieter the mind the louder the soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Live as intensely as possible, burn your candle of life from both ends.
Osho
Virginity comes standard. A good head is earned.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
John Stuart Mill
Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr gethan, ihn zu überwinden? Was ist der Affe für en Menschen? Ein Gelächter oder eine schmerzliche Scham. Und ebendas soll der Mensch für den Übermenschen sein: ein Gelächter oder eine schmerzliche Scham. Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Water is soft, but can maneuver any obstacle; be shrewd, and be gentle, and you too will be able to do likewise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Waldo Emerson
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
Voltaire
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To enter the door of greatness you need the key of faith.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.
Leszek Kołakowski
What you seek for others you find for yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You know you’ve reached the end of a relationship: when your lover now demands that your jokes be funny before they laugh.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”“Darling, what do you mean?”“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.”“How? By being stupid?
Ayn Rand
The years teach us much, which the days never knew.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.
Ivan Illich
Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?
Umberto Eco
Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.
Alain de Botton
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
Remind Youth: It is not necessary to look for confidence. It is there – potentially yours and never hidden; awaiting a commanding voice of faith, hope and affirmation. Speak repetitiously with authority and conviction the self-assurance which only seems lacking, but you simply lost touch with.
T.F. Hodge
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's life is what his thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius
It is easier to wipe a thousand tears from your eyes than to wipe a single tear from your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
One who rules is ruled.
T.F. Hodge
At the beginning love is a fact, at the end it's a theory
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.
Hannah Arendt
Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow – that is where joy resides. For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds.
Confucius
The last thing Scripture should do is make you blind in the world. Instead, you hear everything, see everything, and feel everything because everything just so happens to point right back to it.
Criss Jami
All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language.
James K.A. Smith
But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.
G.K. Chesterton
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
Jacques Ellul
Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.
Baltasar Gracián
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Alan W. Watts
As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The story is told of yourself.
Horace
... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil
Noam Chomsky
Little do men perceive what solitude is and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company and faces are but a gallery of pictures and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.
Francis Bacon
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore
Your church is a baby-house made of blocks.
Henry David Thoreau
Three quarters of faith is boldness.Three quarters of wisdom is intelligence.Three quarters of love is kindness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
Horace
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
G.K. Chesterton
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan
Attention has its most powerful expression in purposeful action.
Ilchi Lee
The moon only dares compete with the stars when the sun is in its corner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.
John Leslie Mackie
All evil, all injustice, all harm that one does to someone else—in sum, all deviation from man's normative nature—in a much more fundamental way and in a far more ultimate sense one does to oneself, and not just metaphorically but literally.
Fazlur Rahman
I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie
Jim Holt
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
Gilles Deleuze
The greatest gift you can give to someone is your heart; because when you give your heart, you are giving your most prized possession.
Matshona Dhliwayo