Quotes by Philosophers - Page 140

The most beautiful rose still has to contend with ugly thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The weaknesses of the wise are better than the strengths of fools.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Think wisely before you exercise an action. Having done so however, never look back and regret. That would be a shame
Thiruvalluvar
Knowledge is the path, understanding is the way, wisdom is the highway, and enlightenment is the destination.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.
Rebecca Goldstein
Many of us fight for and boast our freedom of what is ultimately the ability to prove ourselves to other people. It is unfortunate that only a few of us are so free in our joy, we no longer feel the need to prove ourselves to anyone.
Criss Jami
Stretched and skewedTap of the 8-ball and the cueScratches fall throughThey are the scars of you
Criss Jami
To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.
Blaise Pascal
You weren't born to be a spectator of others while they live life to the fullest. You too were born to make the world a better place, so put your talents into good use.
Gift Gugu Mona
The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man's power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd. To become a crowd, to collect a crowd about one, is on the contrary to affirm the distinctions of human life. The most well-meaning person who talks about these distinctions can easily offend an individual. But then it is not the crowd which possesses power, influence, repute, and mastery over men, but it is the invidious distinctions of human life which despotically ignore the single individual as the weak and impotent, which in a temporal and worldly interest ignore the eternal truth- the single individual.
Søren Kierkegaard
Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.
Lao Tzu
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
Isn't this conception of absolute justice absolutely unjust?
Thomas More
I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.
John Stuart Mill
Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?
Augustine of Hippo
If you want to be happy, love. If you want to be happier, love some more.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is we're actually living on a planet in space. For me that's an extraordinary thought. It's mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can't see the universe for eye-liner. And there are probably boys whose eyes are never raised above the horizon because of football. There can be quite a chasm between a small make-up mirror and a proper mirror telescope! I think it's what they call a 'matter of perspective'. Perhaps it could also be called an 'eye-opener' as well. It's never too late to experience an eye-opener. But many people live their entire lives without realizing that they're floating through empty space.There's too much going on down here. It's hard enough thinking about your looks.We belong on this earth. I'm not trying to dispute it. We're part of nature's life on this planet. Monkeys and reptiles have shown us how we breed, and I have no quarrel with that. In different natural surroundings everything might have been very different, but here we are. And I repeat: I'm not denying it. I just don't think that prevent us from trying to see a little beyond the ends of our noses.
Jostein Gaarder
The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Speaking about work isn’t working.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.
Isabel Paterson
Your relationship or marriage is dead or dying, if you almost always have to remind your partner to miss you (and/or they almost always have to remind you to miss them).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Le spectacle est le mauvais rêve de la société moderne enchaînée, qui n'exprime finalement que son désir de dormir. Le spectacle est le gardien de ce sommeil.
Guy Debord
The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Robert M. Pirsig
The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber
Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view.
Marcus Aurelius
Change lives on the horizon.
T.F. Hodge
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
What must be shall be and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
This primary question of life organization is immensely important. If making money is the main goal, a person can often forget what his or her true interests are or how he or she wants to deserve recognition from others. It is much more difficult to add on other values to a life that started out with just making money in mind than it is to make some personally interesting endeavor financially possible or even profitable.
Pekka Himanen
Thou shalt not follow someone, merely because they are following you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.
Augustine of Hippo
Fashion is simply a guideline for style-less people to appear stylish.
Criss Jami
The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you are a musician,sing to one as if you were singing to a million.If you are a dancer,dance to one as if you were dancing to a million.If you are a performer,perform to one as if you were performing to a million.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau
There is properly no history only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.
Michel Foucault
Experts are by definition the servants of those in power: they don't really THINK, they just apply their knowledge to problems defined by the powerful.
Slavoj Žižek
One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought.
Aristotle
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.
Ayn Rand
The struggle to the top is in itself enough to fulfill the human heart. Sisyphus should be regarded as happy.
Albert Camus
Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.
Otto Weininger
The elephant is the largest, but not the fiercest. The giraffe is the tallest, but not the strongest. The cheetah is the fastest, but not the wisest. The ant is the smallest, but not the gentlest.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A woman’s elegance will charm you for days,her beauty will charm you for weeks,her grace will charm you for years,and her virtue will charm you for a lifetime.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.
Stefan Molyneux
What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!
Aldous Huxley
If you have never reached rock bottom, you have never attended the school of greatness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
Norbert Wiener
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.
Epicurus
....I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)
Plato
We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie?
Rabindranath Tagore
When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy.But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.
G.K. Chesterton
We fancy men are individuals so are pumpkins but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is peculiar to “ressentiment criticism” that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.
Max Scheler
A star never loses its shine, not even in the dark.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Success is like the most beautiful woman:pursued by many, loved by all, feared by few,courted by the patient and hardworking,and won over by good judgment.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Folly consists not in committing Folly, but in being incapable of concealing it. All men make mistakes, but the wise conceal the blunders they have made, while fools make them public. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is seen. If you can’t be good, be careful.
Baltasar Gracián