Quotes by Philosophers - Page 169

One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Thomas Paine
we see that an aspect of the work of the masses consists in investigating and opening up the question of names
Sylvain Lazarus
... he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreamas were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality—why the horror was so total and the ecstacy so complete—and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture—and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had just been a path through some woods.
Ayn Rand
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
John Stuart Mill
Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls.
T.F. Hodge
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is merely brilliance in organization of ideas and not wisdom. The truly wise person goes beyond knowledge.
Confucius
Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The sun does not rise to earn praise; it just shines, and the whole world pays homage.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Except Him, whatever understood,O Bedil~ love made me forget.
Bedil
we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.
Ilyas Kassam
To perceive is to suffer.
Aristotle
Reciprocal marketing, promotions and links. In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance of reciprocity in social situations.
Carl William Brown
I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
Giordano Bruno
The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.
Bertrand Russell
Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Couldn't I try...Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune...But couldn't I in another medium?...It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed - an existent can never justify the existence of another existent. My mistake was to try to resuscitate Monsieur de Rollebon. Another kind of book. I don't quite know which kind - but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn't exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.I am going, I feel irresolute. I dare not make a decision. If I were sure that I had talent...but I have never, never written anything of that sort; historical articles, yes - if you could call them that. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this novel and who would say: 'It was Antoine Roquentin who wrote it, he was a red-headed fellow who hung about in cafés', and they would think that about my life as I think about the life of the Negress: as about something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a tedious, tiring job, it wouldn't prevent me from existing or from feeling that I exist. But a time would have to come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its light would fall over my past. Then, through it, I might be able to recall my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking about this very moment, about this dismal moment at which I am waiting, round-shouldered, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I might feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: 'It was on that day, at that moment that it all started.' And I might succeed - in the past, simply in the past - in accepting myself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Walking on water requires feet of faith.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who has lived a day has lived an age.
Jean de La Bruyère
A little toxin is the best tonic.
David P. Gontar
To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told...and have a sense of humor doing it.
Criss Jami
With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.
Susan Sontag
A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
Eric Hoffer
The notion that the fulfilment of prayer has been determined from eternity, that it was originally included in the plan of creation, is the empty, absurd fiction of a mechanical mode of thought, which is in absolute contradiction with the nature of religion. Whether God decides on the fulfilment of my prayer now, on the immediate occasion of my offering it, or whether he did decide on it long ago, is the same thing.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
Albert Schweitzer
Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.
Novalis
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
Henry David Thoreau
Don’t cry and don’t rage. Understand.
Baruch Spinoza
Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.
Immanuel Kant
It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.
Judith Butler
If man studied himself, he would see how incapable he is of going further.
Blaise Pascal
When bitter, say little; when angry, say nothing; when happy, say much; when joyful, say all.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan W. Watts
Where do we begin this process of reevaluation of values? It makes sense to begin with our mind, which is the tool we use to evaluate. Once we make sure it is functioning as it should, we can feel confident in using it to think about our beliefs and priorities.
Ilchi Lee
Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition
Baruch Spinoza
It is better to win souls than to conquer nations.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.
Criss Jami
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch
Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
The great misfortune of our generation is that the direction which by the amazing progress of the natural sciences has been given to its interests is not one which assists us in comprehending the larger process of which as individuals we form merely a part or in appreciating how we constantly contribute to a common effort without either directing it or submitting to orders of others.
Friedrich A. Hayek
On the other hand, the moral law, although it gives no such prospect, does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and this fact points to a pure intelligible world―indeed, it defines it positively and enable us to know something of it, namely a law.This law gives to the sensible world, as sensuous nature (as this concerns rational beings), the form of an intelligible world, i.e., the form of supersensuous nature, without interfering with the mechanism of the former. Nature, in the widest sense of the word, is the existence of things under laws. The sensuous nature of rational beings in general is their existence under empirically conditioned laws, and therefore it is, from the point of view of reason, heteronomy. The supersensuous nature of the same beings, on the other hand, is their existence according to laws which are independent of all empirical conditions and which therefore belong to the autonomy of pure reason. And since the laws, according to which the existence of things depends on cognition, are practical, supersensuous nature, so far as we can form a concept of it, is nothing else than nature under the autonomy of the pure practical reason. The law of this autonomy is the moral law, and it, therefore, is the fundamental law of supersensuous nature and of a pure world of the understanding, whose counterpart must exist in the world of sense without interfering with the laws of the latter. The former could be called the archetypal world (*natura archetypa*) which we know only by reason; the latter, on the other hand, could be called the ectypal world (*natura ectypa*), because it contains the possible effect of the idea of the former as the determining ground of the will."―from_Critique of Practical Reason_. Translated, with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck, p. 44.
Immanuel Kant
A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up."―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some mistakes are worse than others: wearing your underwear inside out isn’t as uncomfortable as wearing it back to front.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
Rabindranath Tagore
When a dreamer loses his lover, his dream profits. (Unless, of course, the lover was the dreamer's dream.)
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For the wealthy, money is a tool. For the impoverished, it is the rule.
T.F. Hodge
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid.
Simone de Beauvoir
Humility is the acknowledgement that without God you wouldn't have made it thus far.
Gift Gugu Mona
We are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight
Niccolò Machiavelli
Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No one can keep his griefs in their prime they use themselves up.
E. M. Cioran
An arrogant man whose arrogance we see from his own behaviour is more tolerable than a humble man whose humility we hear of from his own mouth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.
Albert Camus
Spirit? Who is that fellow? And where do you know him from? Is he perhaps not merely an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you have not even defined, let alone deduced or proved? Do you think you have an audience of old women in front of you?
Arthur Schopenhauer