Quotes by Philosophers - Page 168

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.
Cornel West
The aim is to love God because the pure heart loves loving God and because the true mind knows He deserves it. Unlike the accusations and beliefs of the critics and skeptics, it is neither an obligation of duty; nor a fear of damnation; nor a wish for power; nor a desire to appear more righteous than others; nor because God needs it; but because through all love, truth, reason, faith, honesty, and joy in and beyond oneself and the universe, He is worthy.
Criss Jami
For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.
Nel Noddings
When I was young, I admired old people.Now that I’m old, I admire wise people.When I was a youth, I admired strong people.Now that I’m old, I admire meek people.When I was an adult, I admired wealthy people.Now that I’m old, I admire happy people.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Pain is the seasoning that gives pleasure its flavor.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The Christian God seemed the most offensive to people precisely because he was the most godlike. He was too perfect even to be coaxed by human efforts, and therefore sent his son to do the job.
Criss Jami
The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person--without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.
Osho
To the bachelor, the language of women is mystery. In those matters, a married man is already a scholar
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
Confucius
In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.
Jonathan Glover
Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Flowers have to stretch to bloom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Mary Wollstonecraft
A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
Few endeavors, if any at all, I find to be inherently mature or inherently immature. Maturity is neither defined by one's particular preferences nor by one's particular activities; rather, it is defined by the strength of one's character.
Criss Jami
Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.
Denis Diderot
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is but a canvas for our imagination
Henry David Thoreau
The beginning of men's rebellion against God was and is the lack of a thankful heart.
Francis Schaeffer
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
John Ruskin
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.
Criss Jami
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.
Bertrand Russell
What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels
...[T]hose who care about their souls and do not subordinate them to the body dissociate themselves firmly from these others and refuse to accompany them on their haphazard journey; and, believing that it is wrong to oppose philosophy with her offer of liberation and purification, they turn and follow her wherever she leads...
Socrates
They succeed not because they are perfect but because they do not let their imperfections stand in their way to success.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.
Erich Fromm
...[R]eason of itself, independent on all experience, ordains what ought to take place, that accordingly actions of which perhaps the world has hitherto never given an example, the feasibility even if which might be very much doubted by one who founds everything on experience, are nevertheless inflexibly commanded by reason; that, for example, even though there might never yet have been a sincere friend, yet not a whit the less is pure sincerity in friendship required of every man...
Immanuel Kant
In a world full of daisies dare to be a rose.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Better things will follow you when you do good things to others.
Gift Gugu Mona
You know what awareness is only when you are aware. Awareness is the perception of your presence in the now.
Ilchi Lee
A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.
Seneca
One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors.
Henry David Thoreau
A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?
Confucius
The maladies of the spirit alone, in abstracto, that is, error and sin, can be called diseases of the mind only per analogiam. They come not within the jurisdiction of the physician, but that of the teacher or clergyman, who again are called physicians of the mind only per analogiam.
Ernst Von Feuchtersleben
We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.
Jonathan Sacks
Speaking generally punishment hardens and numbs it produces concentration it sharpens the consciousness of alienation it strengthens the power of resistance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
None of us can study anything properly unless we do it with our whole being.
Mary Midgley
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
Ayn Rand
Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.
Plato
The less men think the more they talk.
Charles Montesquieu
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
My life doesn't bore me, because I know its worth. So when I let you be part of it, ensure you add value and not attempt to devalue it; or else you can never be part of my future.
Gift Gugu Mona
It is noteworthy that at a time when every religious sanction of authority has vanished, we live in a very authoritarian epoch.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
Nothing really belongs to us but time which even he has who has nothing else.
Baltasar Gracián
Don’t mourn over the past; it has no pity for you. Don’t cry over the present, it has no sympathy for you, and I don’t weep the future, it has no mercy on you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue but the parent of all other virtues.
Cicero
My words are my thesis, my actions are my dissertation, and my life is my philosophy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.
G.K. Chesterton
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn Rand
Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5)The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is.
Alain de Botton
Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
Bruce Lee
Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death
Henry David Thoreau
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Immanuel Kant
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Karl Marx