Quotes by Philosophers - Page 161

The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Thomas Carlyle
It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus
Stefan Molyneux
There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.
Augustine of Hippo
There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory.
G.K. Chesterton
The loveliest roses sometimes bear the ugliest thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rainbow is not afraid of showing its true colors because it knows it is beautiful inside out.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We make versions, and true versions make worlds.
Nelson Goodman
Diamonds are proof that the most valuable things are sometimes formed in the dark.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.
Epictetus
We pass through Time from birth in order to have from where to come, together with death.
Sorin Cerin
If all emotions are common coin, then what is unique to the good man?To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God – saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if the others don’t acknowledge it – this life lived in simplicity, humility, cheerfulness – he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.
Marcus Aurelius
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set to-day a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.
Emanuel Swedenborg
The powerful hate truth that put them in bad light
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.
Gaston Bachelard
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With strength you can move rocks.With faith you can move mountains.With love you can move the world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Shallow men believe in luck wise and strong men in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.
Dallas Willard
Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that they're gonna catch you on the sunny side or that you're gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. That's the whole point of meanness because otherwise it's too obvious. It's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction.
Stefan Molyneux
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
Susan Sontag
He who exercises wisdom, exercises the knowledge which is about God.
Epictetus
Man becomes man only by the intelligence but he is man only by the heart.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
No one's life will be harder because I exist.
Chris Matakas
I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was possible for me to execute myself.
Charles Montesquieu
I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I too endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by constant overuse. Do they still have any meaning?
Pascal Mercier
Philosophy is metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks beings as a whole―the world, man, God―with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being. Metaphysics thinks beings as being in the manner of representational thinking which gives reasons. For since the beginning of philosophy and with that beginning, the Being of beings has showed itself as the ground (arche, aition, principle). The ground is that from which beings as such are what they are in their becoming, perishing, and persisting as something that can be known, handled, and worked upon. As the ground, Being brings beings to their actual presencing. The ground shows itself as presence. The present of presence consists in the fact that it brings what is present each in its own way to presence. In accordance with the actual kind of presence, the ground has the character of grounding as the ontic causation of the real, as the transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects, as the dialectical mediation of the movement of the absolute Spirit and of the historical process of production, as the will to power positing values."―from_The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking_
Martin Heidegger
Sirs, if you are listening and are not acting, it is like a man who is always tilling but never sowing. It is better not to listen to a truth than to listen without acting, for then it becomes a poison.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
John Ruskin
Of course, if one does not fully trust the promise of God's Kingdom, he will have a hard time taking risks and making sacrifices in this life. A gospel centered around the temporal self - fleeting happiness, earthly success, vain prosperity, things such as these - is the primary ambition of the half-hearted Christian; the one who somewhat believes he is subject to an eternal death; the one who just might believe in men before God, who morbidly fears seeming less than anyone else. The man of this school feels deeply that he has but one life to live, that this must be his only chance, and therefore must have it all in his favor - from glory to comfort to riches - and have it right this instant. He is but hinting that he is overcome because he insists always that he must overcome, that his judgment comes now and by the persons around him. The point is, however, in this sense, that by grace the Christian is indeed free, but only for as long as he wants to be free - the practicality of true freedom: that of God which offers not so much freedom to be like the world as it does freedom from the pressures of having to be like the world. For Divine Law is based solely on love and freedom; whereas secular law, pressure and imitation.
Criss Jami
All men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
Søren Kierkegaard
The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word 'metaphysics'. The only definition I have found that fits all cases is: 'a philosophical opinion not held by the present author'.
Bertrand Russell
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for one another.
Albert Camus
If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.
Voltaire
You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.
T.F. Hodge
The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.
Jesus Zamora Bonilla
God has many names though He is only one Being.
Aristotle
We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
Friedrich Nietzsche
...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)
Georges Bataille
Que sais je? [What do I know?]
Montaigne
Fear takes you low, faith takes you high, but love takes you everywhere.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I teach you beyond Man (superman). Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?
Friedrich Nietzsche
You cannot till this year’s land using last year’s sun.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Democracy is a brawl settled in advance by counting heads.
David P. Gontar
The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
Pierre Abélard
We are now forced to actively pursue our struggles. If we do not go out of our way to stretch our comfort zones and grow, no one nor nature will do it for us.
Chris Matakas
Sympathy constitutes friendship but in love there is a sort of antipathy or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other and both together make up one whole.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.
Peter Singer
All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God.
Aldous Huxley
P29 - the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
Paulo Freire
What is food to one man is bitter poison to others
Titus Lucretius Carus
...I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become universal law.
Immanuel Kant
He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age. But to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.
Plato
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
Allan Bloom