Quotes by Philosophers - Page 133

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
Ayn Rand
So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.
John Locke
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the
Edmund Burke
Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon
Fortune reveres the brave and overwhelms the cowardly.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other - and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
Jostein Gaarder
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards...in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others.
Ayn Rand
Enough pain will keep you humble.Enough grief will keep you compassionate.Enough trouble will keep you strong.Enough hardship will keep you grateful.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To understand even remotely the holy omnipotence of God is to understand at least from mostly to wholly the magnificence of Christ.
Criss Jami
Justice is blind, but judges have eyes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.
Susan Sontag
Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.
Simone Weil
You become the master of what you master.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous Huxley
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Theodor W. Adorno
In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.
Peter Sloterdijk
From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
Bertrand Russell
In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' — and this is beyond Y.It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this — that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge?
Roland Puccetti
If god created hell, who will blame his followers for trying to establish it on earth
Bangambiki Habyarimana
What you are, and who you are should provide greater clarity about where you have been and where you are headed. Although one distinguishes spiritual from physical nature, the ultimate unification of the two is the consequence of the struggle for internal, external and eternal – peace.
T.F. Hodge
We sometimes try to impress people we just met by not trying to impress them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The Master is cordial yet stern, awe-inspiring yet not fierce and respectful yet at ease.
Confucius
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
G.K. Chesterton
I don't pray because it makes sense to pray. I pray because my life doesn't make sense without prayer.
Noah Benshea
If I had time, money and knowledge I could write about everything; but no problem, Google is already doing it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own.
Michel de Montaigne
Whether it is big or small, the size of a poor man’s yard incessantly reminds him that he is poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There nearly always is a method in madness.
G.K. Chesterton
It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.
Aristotle
In all your course, walk with God and follow Christ as a little, poor, helpless child, taking hold of Christ’s hand, keeping your eye on the mark of the wounds on his hands and side, whence came the blood that cleanses you from sin and hiding your nakedness under the skirt of the white shining robe of his righteousness.
Jonathan Edwards
He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)
Susan Sontag
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.
Criss Jami
Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell
If you kick a lion when it is down, God help you when it gets up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.
Richard Kearney
You don’t choose the music your enemies play, but you choose which songs you dance to.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Roses do not bloom hurriedly; for beauty, like any masterpiece, takes time to blossom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
Albert Camus
It is reasonable to reason with God because when you only rely on human reasoning, you will be diverted from your purpose.
Gift Gugu Mona
The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.
Bertrand Russell
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
Plato
Liberality consists less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.
Jean de La Bruyère
Some people's theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.
Criss Jami
It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls.
Gustav Kafka
It's only when we dare to experience the full anxiety of knowing that life doesn't go on forever that we can experience transcendence and get in touch with the infinite. To use an analogy from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the necessary ground for the figure of Being to make itself known to us. It's only when we're willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls "the leap of faith."p. 43
Thomas Cathcart
Everyone should have a place in your heart, but only a special few should have a place in your life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is nothing more shameful than perfidious friendship.
Marcus Aurelius
Even if dogma has a purpose, it can never function as a substitute for faith, only as a dry aspect of it.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.
Albert Schweitzer
May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?
Ayn Rand
The heaven of the envied is hell for the envious.
Baltasar Gracián
Record what you can, pursue your passions, connect with the world, fight the good fight, defy evil, shine incandescently as best you can. And it doesn't matter what field it's in but, it does matter that we leave something that accumulates over time.
Stefan Molyneux