Quotes by Philosophers - Page 162

Who you are as a person far outweighs what you do in an athletic arena.
Chris Matakas
The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.
Bertrand Russell
Wildness is the preservation of the World.
Henry David Thoreau
I have seen far by seeing through the lens of Jiu Jitsu. I have exchanged a great deal of physical health for these insights, and these were trades worth making. My efforts were worth the return. I have sacrificed much in the name of this craft. Not for trophies or belts or prestige. For these fall away like dust. I pursued this art so fervently because it was not actually Jiu Jitsu I pursued. It was myself.
Chris Matakas
Your feet may be small, but travel much. Your hands may be little, but conquer much. Your eyes may be tiny, but perceive much. Your ears may be modest, but heed much.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I believe we must pursue mastery for who we become along the way in its achievement. When we progress in Jiu Jitsu, that newfound experience and wisdom transcends into all areas of our lives. We use Jiu Jitsu as the vehicle for growth, but that growth radiates over all of human activity. Someone who devotes time and energy in learning this skill is learning far more than how to subdue an opponent. The student learns persistence, perseverance, pattern recognition, problem solving, and most importantly, learning how to learn. In the arena of life, these virtues are far more valuable than any guard pass.
Chris Matakas
Do not risk your life for someone who does not care about you.
Gift Gugu Mona
Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.
John Cage
Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
In my own life, I have always viewed personal mastery as simply a medium through which I become capable of providing more service toward my fellow man.
Chris Matakas
The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.
Søren Kierkegaard
The end of pain we take as happiness.
Giacomo Leopardi
After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.
Michel Foucault
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.
John Dewey
Courage is the best slayer-courage which attacketh for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unhappy is the man though he rule the world who doesn't consider himself supremely blessed.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Susan Sontag
The sweetest victories come after the bitterest defeats.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Eric Hoffer
Not only England but every Englishman is an island.
Novalis
Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat
Gregory B. Sadler
I came into marriage with love but when I got there she refused the dictatorship and fled away, I and my wife are looking for her. Anyone who finds her please contact us. We swear not to harm her again
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks but only at what he does himself to make it just and holy.
Marcus Aurelius
One is never afraid of the unknown one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
High and holy ambition--to be a saint--is not opposed to holy humility--total reliance on God's grace. Exactly the opposite. Ambition without humility is ambition that fails. It is pride, which goes before a fall (Prov 16:18). Humility without ambition is false humility.
Peter Kreeft
In the game of life, we all receive a set of variables and limitations in the field of play. We can either focus on the lack thereof or empower ourselves to create better realities with the pieces we play the game with.
T.F. Hodge
Be patient. Everything has it's time. You can't make an orange mature right away because you are hungry
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue not a companion in vice.
Cicero
No more roundabout discussions of what makes a good man. Be one!
Marcus Aurelius
Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don’t respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. “But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!” No kidding. That’s the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. That’s the trouble with “pure” philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive (like the Copernican theory--at least at first), this means that “pure” philosophy must just concede impotence and retreat into conservative conceptual anthropology until the advance of science puts it out of its misery. Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of these folk concepts are illusion-generators. The way to take that prospect seriously is to consider theories that propose revisions to those concepts.
Daniel C. Dennett
What you endured was a sign of what you would become.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.
Paul Brunton
A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.
Jean-François Lyotard
Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.
Stefan Molyneux
It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude.
Criss Jami
For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.
Alain de Botton
But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.
Frédéric Gros
The word Familia did not originally signify the ideal of our modern philistine, which is a compound of sentimentality and domestic discord. Among the Romans, in the beginning, it did not even refer to the married couple and their children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. The expression was invented by the romans to describe a new social organism, the head of which had under him wife and children and a number of slaves, under Roman paternal power, with power of life and death over them all.
Friedrich Engels
In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.
Cornel West
There is no love that is not self-love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Perception of one's life journey does not, always or necessarily, have to be judged as good or bad. It certainly demands that one take responsibility for all aspects of it, however.
T.F. Hodge
I attended the University of Earth, and earned my P.H.D in life from the school of hardship.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.
Will Durant
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys
Friedrich Nietzsche
The higher you rise, the smaller your enemies.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Lovely flowers sometimes bloom in ugly places.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.
Edmund Burke
...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
Karl Marx
I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism. The individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete.
Ortega y Gasset
And after winter folweth grene May.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.
John Cage
Everybody is talking about the Law of Attraction. Nobody is talking about the Law of Action.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Time is the product of changing realities beings existences.
Nicholas Berdyaev
If you are wise live as you can if you cannot live as you would.
Baltasar Gracián
The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking, live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
Søren Kierkegaard
The struggles of the past are the gateway to the blessings of the future.
Matshona Dhliwayo