Quotes by Philosophers - Page 132

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Marcus Aurelius
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus
Despise no new accident in your body, but ask opinion of it… There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man’s observation, what he finds good and of what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.
Francis Bacon
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
Mary Midgley
Diyar-e-Ishq Mein Apna Maqam Paida Kar,Naya Zamana, Naye Subah-o-Sham Paida Kar;Khuda Agar Dil-e-Fitrat Shanas De Tujh Ko,Sakoot-e-Lala-o-Gul Se Kalaam Paida Kar;Mera Tareeq Ameeri Nahin, Faqeeri Hai,Khudi Na Baich, Ghareebi Mein Naam Paida KarBuild in love’s empire your hearth and your home;Build Time anew, a new dawn, a new eve!Your speech, if God give you the friendship of Nature,From the rose and tulip’s long silence weaveThe way of the hermit, not fortune, is mine;Sell not your soul! In a beggar’s rags shine.
Muhammad Iqbal
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
Sam Harris
The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Generally, men prefer dating women they love over women who love them; women prefer the opposite.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.
Voltaire
If you have food on your table, clothes on your back, a roof on your head, and a dream in your heart, you have everything you need in life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A King and Queen cannot support a crown with eyes looking down. Their universe expands as far as you can see.
T.F. Hodge
The easiest way to be the prettiest girl at a party is to rig the guest list.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As for Doing-good,that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberatelyforsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands ofme, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a likebut infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preservesit.
Henry David Thoreau
The human heart is a dark, unyielding mystery. It is a perforated jug with a mouth forever open; though all rivers of the earth pour in, it will remain empty and thirsting. The greatest of hopes had not filled it. Would it be filled now by the greatest of despairs? (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness
Frantz Fanon
Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Turn your failures into lessons, your obstacles into opportunities, your tragedies into triumphs, and in no time you will turn your dreams into reality.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An expensive coffin does not decrease the deceased’s chances of going to hell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.
Augustine of Hippo
Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Peter Singer
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Blaise Pascal
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Albert Camus
Don't take life for granted.Don't compare yourself to others.Don't run from your problems.Don't entertain negative people.Don't abuse your friendships.Don't hold onto the past.Don't throw away opportunities.Don't blame others for your failures.Don't quarrel over small issues.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
Michel de Montaigne
The sharper the arrow the quicker the hunt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Souls are made of dawn-stuff and starshine.
Elbert Hubbard
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
Pascal
Love is your greatest asset, fear is your greatest liability, and joy is your greatest reward.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When comprehending how different people truly are, you also comprehend the absolute necessity of some divine authority.
Criss Jami
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Albert Camus
Life is just a dream, to some it's a sweet dream, to others, a nightmare. But whatever it is, it's always short and dissipates quickly.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don’t be afraid of being alone; remember, when the sun rises, it rises with nobody at its side.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Existentialism” is a thinkingThat no longer wishes to think; this means the destructionOf the true thinking that constitutes man.The existentialist fanaticsDislocate their brains for nothing — it is only a case ofSelf-delusion and self-promotion.For to think truly means: recollection.Let the fools spin their foolishness.-----“Daseinsphilosophie” — sie ist ein DenkenDes Nichtmehr-Denkenwollens: so ZerstörungDes wahren Denkens, das den Menschen macht.Die Existenz-Fanatiker verrenkenSich das Gehirn für nichts — nur SelbstbetörungUnd Selbstbespiegelung kommt in Betracht.Denn wirklich denken heißet: sich besinnen.Und lasst die Narren ihre Torheit spinnen.
Frithjof Schuon
Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.
Aristotle
Property is theft.
Proudhon
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
Susan Sontag
If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one’s clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Marijuana enhances our mind in a way that enables us to take a different perspective from 'high up', to see and evaluate our own lives and the lives of others in a privileged way. Maybe this euphoric and elevating feeling of the ability to step outsidethe box and to look at life’s patterns from this high perspective is the inspiration behind the slang term “high” itself.
Sebastian Marincolo
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality?
Ortega y Gasset
All great men come out of the middle classes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When enemies, the intellect and the heart only see one another as the hater and the fool.
Criss Jami
I speak the truth not so much as I would but as much as I dare and I dare a little more as I grow older.
Michel de Montaigne
For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.
Criss Jami
And most importantly, the next time someone asks you "Who are you?" you must answer in this simple way, with sincerity and conviction: "I am an Earth Citizen
Ilchi Lee
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack
Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer Et Al
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt.
John Stuart Mill
Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft,Why fall ye thus before a little wind?
Dante Alighieri
I am what I have ever read
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.
Henry David Thoreau
I shall always consider the best guesser the best prophet.
Cicero
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.
Ayn Rand
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Michel Foucault
It is not enought to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.
G.E. Moore
Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm.
Criss Jami
Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.
Arthur Drews