Quotes by Philosophers - Page 156

Who can be close to you without the Divine Light of his heart?
Sorin Cerin
Here is your great soul—the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Seneca
A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way.
Criss Jami
The Master doesn't try to be powerful;thus he is truly powerful.The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;thus he never has enough.The Master does nothing,yet he leaves nothing undone.The ordinary man is always ding things,yet many more are left to be done.[…]Therefore the Master concerns himselfWith the depths and not the surface,With the fruit and not the flower.[…]Teaching without words,Performing without actions:That is the Master’s way.[…]The Master arrives without leaving,Sees the light without looking,Achieves without doing a thing.[…]The Master is above the people,And no one feels oppressed.She goes ahead of the people,And no feels manipulated.The whole world is grateful to her.Because she completes with no one,No one can complete with her.
Lao Tzu
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Bertrand Russell
Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.
Novalis
A man who preserves his integrity no real, long-lasting harm can ever come.
Socrates
At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.
Jean Baudrillard
It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
G.K. Chesterton
A hunter’s meal is in proportion to his skill.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us.
Neel Burton
If life is music, I sometimes feel as though I was born on the off-beat of the song, and I love it. As Christian numbers reportedly decrease in America, my love for Christ feels as though it increases. Perhaps that is a little strange, yes, but in all honesty, I now want to be thought unfaithful about as much as a smug aristocrat wants to be thought a hobo.
Criss Jami
An atheist is a man who does not believe the existence of a God; now, no one can be certain of the existence of a being whom he does not conceive, and who is said to unite incompatible qualities.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
All the good stuff has already been said by someone somewhere at some point in time. You just have to find it. Today, communication pretty much comes down to understanding - saying what you have to say clearly and effectively...and then living it.
Criss Jami
Information is information, not matter or energy.
Norbert Wiener
Life has no map; it's made of random events, always caused by something beyond your control.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
Muriel Barbery
If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.
René Girard
As falsehood peels like paint, eternal truth is uncovered.
T.F. Hodge
A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.
Elbert Hubbard
The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
Christ is our Friend; He is also the Righteous King. God is our Father; He is also the Sovereign Lord. Christianity can be said to be both a religion and a relationship. You may often hear the cliché that it is not a religion, but a relationship only - which, I believe, is a bit too vague a statement - 'religion' has long had different meanings and implications depending on who you ask or where you are coming from. Honestly, it is sometimes the case that Christians like to think they are too cool and free and up-close and personal with God to be like other religions. Perhaps that could be argued, that could be the case, as it is written thus: 'You are no longer a slave to sin, but God's child.' So we might very well assert that Christianity is not at all some stale philosophy centered around legalistic guilt and empty rule-keeping, as the modernists so commonly define religion; although by other definitions we might as well be boasting that it is 'The Religion' simply by claiming that it is too real and too special to be deemed 'just another religion'.
Criss Jami
Unless they are off duty, no matter how wide it is, and even when it is sincere, a smile seems fake if the job description of the person who is smiling includes smiling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.
Karl Marx
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
G.K. Chesterton
Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.
Julia Kristeva
Happiness is activity of soul.
Aristotle
Do not only think about it, but feel about it, also, before taking appropriate action.
T.F. Hodge
What can be added to the happiness of man who is in health out of debt and has a clear conscience?
Adam Smith
When your dream turns into a nightmare, rise to the challenge and slaughter the dragons
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.
Noam Chomsky
Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Simone Weil
A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…
John Stuart Mill
The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
Nikos Kazantzakis
He who flees from trial confesses his guilt.
Syrus
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Plato
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus
Unless you bear with the faults of a friend you betray your own.
Publilius Syrus
Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.
Criss Jami
Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.
Paul Tillich
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You don't have to finish today, what is important is that you finish. But remember today might be the last day of your life.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is in vain to chase two birds at the same time, even if you have a thousand legs.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.
Augustine of Hippo
Life is like water in a glass. Drop by drop the glass empties.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.
Henry David Thoreau
Tis the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.
Criss Jami
The poor eats with his eyes, the rich with his mouth.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him.
Immanuel Kant
Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
Karl Marx
To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.
Zygmunt Bauman
The distance between you and the door when you have had enough of your spouse is love.
Matshona Dhliwayo