Quotes by Philosophers - Page 135

In adversity remember to keep an even mind.
Horace
One in three all friends are:Brothers in distress,equals facing rivals,free men - facing death!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
When you realize you are no longer made of glass, you lose the desire to demonstrate that fragility in others.
Chris Matakas
In the present moment, no past achievement has any bearing, but we perpetually bring ourselves into the here and now; we are our constant companion. By carving the ineffable nature of my soul, rather than simply pursuing the "W," I am able to bring all of my past accomplishments with me into the present. They do hold bearing on today, not because of what I have done, but because of who I have become. This is what matters.
Chris Matakas
A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
Aristotle
Does god need our prayers? No. God doesn't need anything. A god in need is not a god indeed. So why do we pray? We pray out of a sense of gratitude. Prayer is a thank you. We feel better when we have offered our gratitude to the creator. Prayer is for our emotional and spiritual edification
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
Sri Aurobindo
Birds do not attend music school, but compose timeless masterpieces.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Perhaps not everything happens for a reason. That is, until you make it so; because for everything there is a season, which can, in fact, become beautiful.
Criss Jami
The capacity for suffering – or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness – is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language or for higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark ‘the insuperable line’ that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a child. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because mice will suffer if they are treated in this way.
Peter Singer
True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man to enjoy the present without anxious dependence on the future not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have which is abundantly sufficient.
Seneca
Some people avoid thinking deeply in public, only because they are afraid of coming across as suicidal.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
Michel de Montaigne
If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The greatest wisdom is to be happy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Oh! Lord should I forget anything, never let me forget that without you I am nothing.
Gift Gugu Mona
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Emil M. Cioran
One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum.
Criss Jami
Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like.
Bart Schultz
Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons.
Criss Jami
The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.
Criss Jami
Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
Ivan Illich
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
Francis Bacon
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
At ten, you are foolish. At twenty, you are naive. At thirty, you are alert. At forty, you are experienced. At fifty, you are wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One does not ask about one's true identity simply as a matter of course, but only in rather special circumstances. What this means, I believe, is that "who I really am" becomes an issue for me only when my system of values "breaks down," that is, only when I realize that the values according to which I have lived until now are insufficient to inform a life that I can recognize as satisfying. This realization can occur in variety of circumstances: when my beliefs about myself or the world undergo significant change; when I find that two of my values conflict in a fundamental way; or when, as in the present example, the relations among my previous commitments are insufficiently determinate to tell me what to do in the particular situation I face.
Frederick Neuhouser
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstances.
William James
One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.
Frantz Fanon
The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.
Will Durant
It is not our religion, still less the colour of our skin, that produces virtue; virtue must be practised. Therefore, let no one do to others what he would not have done to himself.
Yagnavalkya
No one has yet computed how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage.
Henry S. Haskins
An eagle does not crawl because it was born to fly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.
Baruch Spinoza
I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.
Bertrand Russell
If you choose money over love, you will always be poor.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse suicide.
Albert Camus
Worthy admonitions cannot fail to inspire us, but what matters is changing ourselves. Reverent advice cannot fail to encourage us, but what matters is acting on it. Encouraged without acting, inspired without changing – there’s nothing to be done for such people.
Confucius
A man's happiness: to do the things proper to man.
Marcus Aurelius
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
There is no doubt that Einstein's pipe was his closest associate, while others--including wife and family--were never permitted the illusion that they would ever be at the center of his life.
Palle Yourgrau
It is suspected, by some, that spiritual beings are extremely jealous of the natural world because they are nothing more than a figment of the imagination. This might explain their compulsive and obsessive behavior in trying to convince others they are real, and that the natural world is an illusion. The end of the world scenarios they conjure up reveal their Napoleon whit and superiority complex.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
What river can flood over the mountains of your love?
Sorin Cerin
A friend is someone who knows all about you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Hubbard
A man does not have to be an angel to be a saint.
Albert Schweitzer
Go oft to the house of thy friend for weeds choke the unused path.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
John Mark Reynolds
An angry enemy is a conquered enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon
Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
Epicurus
Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
Stefan Molyneux
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
G.K. Chesterton
The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.
Erich Fromm
Some people are good only because they are afraid of punishment. These justify why we need government
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If the light within you is greater than the darkness around you, you are a star.
Matshona Dhliwayo