Quotes by Philosophers - Page 136

Fish cannot swim out of water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.
Noam Chomsky
The life you wish you had will come by working like you never have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament. Fast rather than slow, more rather than less—this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse.
Masanobu Fukuoka
The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.
Robert Musil
Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
G.K. Chesterton
Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness or else forgiving another.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
3 o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre
When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music.
Criss Jami
I've played Romeo for Juliet(But in depth)It's vignettes of silhouettes(And then read)And watched Russian roulette, yeah red SovietYet doing it simultaneouslyWhile dropping down shed oubliettesTurned around and took truth to the head thatLove is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death
Criss Jami
Somebody is born. Somebody goes to school. Somebody learns to conform. Somebody types a CV. Somebody gets a job. Somebody follows orders. Somebody gets a golden watch. And then, eventually, Somebody dies. And, a Nobody is buried.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
William James
Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
Bruce Lee
I am not here to merely argue about the perplexities regarding theism or philosophy, but to be a light to the world and to reach out to those who long to be a part of that light.
Criss Jami
We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free.
Cicero
Stars shine even for those who refuse to look up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It's not what we can do that makes us great, but what we can do but don't which make us great
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If the nose of Cleopatra had been a little shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Pascal
Alas! how light a cause may move dissention between hearts that love!
Thomas More
To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.
Michel Montaigne
Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary?
Socrates
Men forget where the way leads and what they meet with every day seems strange to them.We should not act and speak like men asleep.
Heraclitus
No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beautiful beginnings are often born from ugly endings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A cup of wisdom is more valuable than an ocean of intelligence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Existence is beyond the power of wordsTo define:Terms may be usedBut are none of them absolute.In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,Words came out of the womb of matter;And whether a man dispassionatelySees to the core of lifeOr passionatelySees the surface,The core and the surfaceAre essentially the same,Words making them seem differentOnly to express appearance.If name be needed, wonder names them both:From wonder into wonderExistence opens.
Lao Tzu
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
The right thing done at the wrong timewill not bring about the right results.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
Dallas Willard
High heels are a short (theist) woman's (subconscious) way of telling God to go to hell … in public.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All mankind love a lover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ‘75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.
Henry David Thoreau
I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life. I say that very often the simple do not know much about doctrine. I say that often hordes of simple people have confused Catharist preaching with that of the Patarines, and these together with that of the Spirituals. The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of distinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist.
Umberto Eco
From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.
Publilius Syrus
If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.
Denise Riley
Fish rule the waters,but can be caught using worms.Birds rule the air,but can be caught using grain.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.
Confucius
Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just a mess. It's like looking into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology.
David Berlinski
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Will Durant
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon
My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.Truly yours,Albert Camus”I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
Albert Camus
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.
Aldous Huxley
Nature exists for man to exploit for his own ends, while the end of man himself is nothing else but to serve God, to be grateful to Him, and to worship Him alone.
Fazlur Rahman
Logically, you should go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a good degree, go into the workplace, then work hard and be happy. The only problem is that happiness isn't logical.
A.C. Ping
The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like the root of a tree. All a tree’s fruit and flowers, branches and leaves depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort.
Bodhidharma
Success produces success just as money produces money.
Nicolas de Chamfort
This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of to-day two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards an that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.
Ortega y Gasset
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is difficult transient is her reward.
Friedrich von Schiller
Jesus’s use of the phrasing “a new commandment” is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the “new covenant” with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ. . . . We are no longer simply Christ’s “followers" - the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called “disciple” - but also perpetual Christ incarnators . . .
Carl Raschke
Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.
Jonathan Sacks
Time is a created thing. To say, "I don't have time" is like saying "I don't want to.
Lau-tzu
Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’—in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is the age of the individual and there is no reason to believe that this focus of mankind is likely to change in the foreseeable future. Hence, the mission is to put individualism inside a wide context and to give it meaning and a sense of direction; to empower it – but authentically this time.
Shai Tubali
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.
Umberto Eco
Some people spend the best part of their lives living the dreams of others
Bangambiki Habyarimana