Quotes by Philosophers - Page 128

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
G.K. Chesterton
Cognition begins with sensation.
Richard Tarnas
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
Albert Camus
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations
Adam Smith
He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
Miracles' rely on their observer’s ignorance. 'Perfection' relies on the observer’s failure to notice the observed’s defects.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age.
Masanobu Fukuoka
In my youth I had three teachers: friends, enemies, and books. In my adulthood I had three professors: God, nature, and life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.
Aristotle
By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void.
Democritus
One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.
Stefan Molyneux
This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.
G.K. Chesterton
The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.
Richard M. Rorty
Don't put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.
Epictetus
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Living exists when life lives through us … life is a living now!
Bruce Lee
The nearer a soul is to God, the more it deserves our esteem; the closer the ties that bit it to us, the more sensible is our love for it, and the more whole-hearted should be the devotion we show in all that concerns family, country, vocation, and friendship. Thus, instead of destroying patriotism, charity exalts it, as we see in the case of St. Joan of Arc or St. Louis.
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
Another basic characteristic of liberalism which constitutes a formidable obstacle to an oppressed group's liberation is its conception of human nature. If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate, really are among defining human traits, as every liberal philosopher since Locke tries to convince us, the oppression in civil society—i.e. in the social sphere not regulated by the state—is a fact of life, and the basic civil relationship between a man and a women will always remain a battlefield. Woman, being less aggressive, is then either the less human of the two and doomed to subjugation, or else she must get more power-hungry herself and try to dominate man. Liberation for both is not feasible.
Mihailo Markovic
Herbs may be bitter, but cure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The less you look to others,the more you find in yourself.What have you found in yourself.
Ron W. Rathbun
The best chapters in your life story are written by love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire,(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices
John N Gray
A vessel's beauty does not determine how much water it carries.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you meet a number of failures the causes of which are not known, look for something that is common for each failure and that is never present when there is a success.
Jon Stuart Mill
A beam or pillar can be used to batter down a city wall, but it is no good for stopping up a little hole - this refers to a difference in function. Thoroughbreds like Qiji and Hualiu could gallop a thousand li in one day, but when it came to catching rats they were no match for the wildcat or the weasel - this refers to a difference in skill. The horned owl catches fleas at night and can spot the tip of a hair, but when daylight comes, no matter how wide it opens its eyes, it cannot see a mound or a hill - this refers to a difference in nature. Now do you say, that you are going to make Right your master and do away with Wrong, or make Order your master and do away with Disorder? If you do, then you have not understood the principle of heaven and earth or the nature of the ten thousand things. This is like saying that you are going to make Heaven your master and do away with Earth, or make Yin your master and do away with Yang. Obviously it is impossible.
Zhuangzi
A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.
Jean Vanier
This constant mental diatribe and the frustrations, worries, insecurities and muscular tension that ensues are the self.
Chris Matakas
We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.
Cornel West
When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The belief in death leads meditating about life; meanwhile, the belief in life leads you thinking about death.
Sorin Cerin
The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals and then a few that punish them.
Abraham Tucker
Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke
The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.
Ayn Rand
Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.
Alan W. Watts
Advice is like snow the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To be intuitive is to possess a godly characteristic: to be bad at second-guessing the good.
Criss Jami
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
Albert Camus
Never read a book that is not a year old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I love a dose of (good) theology or philosophy, I probably also love discipline, improvement, wisdom, and challenges. If I hate it, I am probably too comfortable and proud to try to question myself.
Criss Jami
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past present and future.
Susan Sontag
Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze
Is not that government both unjust and ungrateful, that is so prodigal of it's favors to those called gentlemen, or goldsmiths, or such others who are idle, or live either by flattery or by contriving the arts of vain pleasure, and, on the other hand, takes no care of those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, and smiths, without whom it could not subsist? But after the public has reaped all the advantage of their service, and they come to be oppressed with age, sickness, and want, all their labours and the good they have done is forgotten, and all the recompense given them is that they are left to die in great misery.
Thomas More
Gray hairs signify old age, not wisdom.Muscles signify strength, not health.Laughter signifies amusement, not joy.Weeping signifies pain, not weakness.Smiling signifies courteousness, not love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given.
Plato
It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.
Paul Brunton
A man often runs the risk of throwing away a witticism if he admits that it is his own.
Jean de La Bruyère
It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong
Voltaire
Talent is like a little seed; when nurtured, it will flourish.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.
P.D. Ouspensky
It is easier to move mountains using God's hands.
Matshona Dhliwayo
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
Albert Camus
The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.
Stefan Molyneux
Honour, like insult, comes from others. It is their recognition of our worth. It is the intrusion of the social into the psychological, the public into the private. After all, others honour us for what they find of worth in us. ‘To pursue [honour],’ wrote Baruch Spinoza in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677), ‘we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding, fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they commonly seek.’ So what we come to think of as worthwhile in ourselves is bound to have as a large component what others think to be worthwhile in us.
C. D. C. Reeve