Quotes by Philosophers - Page 148

Although I've always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.
Jostein Gaarder
Ego, being love's kryptonite; two souls must be on the same page of humility.
T.F. Hodge
The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.
René Descartes
It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal.
Neel Burton
Never hide your fear because it will become your own God, hidden inside you.
Sorin Cerin
The President was in seventh heaven when he heard himself being teased like this; he strutted about and thrust his chest out; never did a man of the robe stick out his neck so far, not even one who has just hanged a man.
Marquis de Sade
If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
On the one hand you had people constantly fighting Hell; on the other, you had people constantly fighting Hell on earth.
Criss Jami
We should expect the best and the worst from mankind as from the weather.
Vauvenargues
An ounce of joy is the equivalent of a ton of happiness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am not sure if women are attracted to genius. Can you imagine the wise wizard winning the woman over the gallant swordsman? It seems rather otherworldly in more ways than one.
Criss Jami
A man of God has many brothers. He is a wounded soldier - he is familiar with the pain one feels in his heart, as a close and loving brother, when a brother falls victim of evil men or turns to evil desires (the latter sometimes even betrayal). Because of this, too, he is and must be well-acquainted with and trained in the strengths of hope and the gentleness of forgiveness and mercy.
Criss Jami
Inner beauty magnifies outer beauty.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As cliché as it might sound, I'd rather lose than win by cheating. The latter is a much deeper, more personal loss in that one is admittedly whispering to himself his lack of competence. His cheating then begets more cheating, as he is ever-privately, ever-subconsciously insulting himself; thus, gradually deteriorating any remaining confidence.
Criss Jami
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
Henry David Thoreau
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.
Bruce Lee
There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.
Criss Jami
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in everygeneration may not come that far, but none comes further.
Søren Kierkegaard
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.
Karl Popper
But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
Aurobindo Sri
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
Søren Kierkegaard
Fame for the lames, fortune for the brains.
T.F. Hodge
When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.
Frédéric Gros
Water is not frightened of the ocean. Light is not frightened of the Sun.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
Jostein Gaarder
Devoting yourself to a particular art is invaluable. The art becomes our vehicle with which we drive down the road of life. We use this vehicle to learn about ourselves and this place, to conquer fears, to become more of what we already are. In my own life, I have found most valuable the transferable skills of learning from jiu jitsu to all other facets of day to day study. In devoting myself with such commitment to this art, in undertaking the task of understanding jiu jitsu to whatever degree by circumstance allows, I have unknowingly learned how to learn.
Chris Matakas
But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.
Daniel C. Dennett
In temples you find religion, but in hearts you find God.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
Edmund Burke
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.
Alan W. Watts
The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition
Rabindranath Tagore
The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.
Stefan Molyneux
A man’s spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.
Ayn Rand
Do not try to lead men who are unwilling to follow you; if their heart is not in it, you will never find the old spirit or the old courage.
Arrian
Politics is an endless, borderless war against individual liberty.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
Ayn Rand
As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.
Karl Marx
What do I love when I love my God?
Augustine of Hippo
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
Albert Camus
I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.
Oswald Spengler
But to declare his wishes only in some unknown corner of Asia, to choose the most double-dealing and the most superstitious of peoples as followers, and the vilest, most ridiculous, and most roguish working man as representative, to muddle up the message so much that it is impossible to comprehend, to teach it only to a tiny number of individuals while leaving everyone else in the dark, and to punish them for remaining there... Oh, no, Therese, no, no, such atrocities cannot be our guide. I would rather die a thousand times than believe in them. When atheism wants martyrs, let it choose them and my blood is ready.
Marquis de Sade
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya
Ibn Arabi
A great man is always willing to be little.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.
Pascal Mercier
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
Max Stirner
He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.
Blaise Pascal
Work and acquire and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.
Vilém Flusser
Doubt is your intellectual conscience pleading with you to be honest with yourself.
Peter Boghossian
Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Mark Fisher
Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
Swami Vivekananda
Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
William James
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
Marquis de Sade
It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel