Quotes by Philosophers - Page 158

When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.
Criss Jami
This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile.
Emmanuel Levinas
It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it is also perfectly understandable why the purification of the soul is considered an integral part of the methodology of knowledge.
Osman Bakar
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Marshall McLuhan
Power hungry=life loving
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got.
G.K. Chesterton
Before we ask the cosmos for the power to have all our thoughts manifest, we need to train ourselves to become more aware, or mindful, of our thoughts, and think wisely enough to use this power for the benefit of all.
Ilchi Lee
A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dream with all of your mind.Work with all of your heart.Persevere with all of your strength.Succeed with all of your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
Thomas Carlyle
If matters go badly now they will not always be so.
Horace
If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt.
Marcus Aurelius
If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
If my mother will not go to heaven, I renounce the privilege
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The disruption of science is one which abandons the method and seeks to conquer grounds outside its territory. It is not at all religion but this pseudo-science that is the enemy of science.
Criss Jami
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
William James
You will see true character after a defeated ambition
Bangambiki Habyarimana
What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Virtue is like a rich stone best plain set.
Sir Francis Bacon
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
Iris Murdoch
Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.
Plato
How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?
Didier Eribon
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
Thomas Nagel
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not endured with patient resignation.
Bertrand Russell
Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.
Blaise Pascal
Learn what you can, teach what you know, live how you ought.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show greatness not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.
Blaise Pascal
Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.
Richard Kearney
Believing is the shortcut to achieving.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic.
G.K. Chesterton
Love sees more with its eyes closed than hate with its eyes open.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Lead us toward a speech, which is as beautiful as silence, and toward a silence, which is as beautiful as the sweetest and truest of words. (119)
Jean-Yves Leloup
The ultimate foundation of spirituality is the recognition that there can't be such a thing as a purposeful life in a purposeless universe.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Although they will miss his presence if he dies, his condition is too burdensome to require his continued presence. In such circumstances, what is selfish is the insistence that the prospective suicide remain alive, not that he seek his own demise. The argument about selfishness can backfire in another way. Just as it is sometimes the case that those who kill themselves have accorded insufficient weight to the interests of others, so it is sometimes the case that those who do not kill themselves make this error. Consistent with what I have already said, I do not think that the interests of others are decisive. Nevertheless, there are situations in which a person's interest in continued life is negligible, because he will die soon anyway, and the quality of his life is appalling. If seeing out his days, rather than taking his own life earlier, would spell financial ruin for his family (because of the costs of his medical care), then it may well be unduly selfish not to take one's own life.
David Benatar
A seed rises from dirt to prove to the world that its greatness lies not on what the world thinks of it, but from within.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.
Bertrand Russell
All religions are man-made God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
What God is to the world parents are to their children.
Philo
certain details, somewhat curtailed, live in my memory. But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy.
Cornel West
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.
Arthur Schopenhauer
You will never really think hard about your life until your oxygen mask is taken away from you when you are at the bed of the ocean. At that exact moment, your true self will be revealed. You will really know if you are a believer or an atheist, whether you really love life or hate it as you usually say. All your claims will be tested
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A blush of breeze rose from the grass. Jacob felt as if an angel's wing had beat against his cheek. He touched his cheek slowly. He felt embarrassed by the thought."That I should think an angel came to me."He wept. And, again, the brush of breeze against his cheek.
Noah Benshea
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
William James
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man's enjoyment.
Bertrand Russell
They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig?
Plato
Failure is your best asset, complacency is your worst liability, and talent is your greatest capital.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
Jean Baudrillard
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I’m told, into God.” - Zorba.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
Robert M. Pirsig
The true object of all human life is play.
G.K. Chesterton
From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility.
György Lukács
What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
G.K. Chesterton
Anger is momentary madness so control your passion or it will control you.
Horace
We are not our own light.
Nicolas Malebranche
Leave off asking what tomorrow will bring, andwhatever days fortune will give, count themas profit.
Horace
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.
Arthur Schopenhauer