Quotes by Philosophers - Page 170

A tree’s nature does not change because the wind blew off a few of its leaves.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Life occasionally humbles us by making us turned on by someone whom we turn off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Look behind you in gratitude.Look ahead of you in hope.Look beside you in caution.Look around you in faith.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The best learners are the best earners.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
Simone de Beauvoir
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
Henry David Thoreau
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.
Robert M. Pirsig
Though I am weak yet God when prayed Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sun also shines on the wicked.
Seneca
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
Sir Francis Bacon
A man who knows he is a fool is not a great fool.
Chuang-tzu
The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.
John Stuart Mill
Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Iris Murdoch
God has entrusted me with myself.
Epictetus
There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
Henry David Thoreau
All we think about in the cycle of violence is men. If we miss the oestrogen factor we cannot solve the cycle of violence. We cannot bring peace to the world unless we hold women accountable and morally responsible, particularly for their attacks upon children.
Stefan Molyneux
Old wood best to burn old wine to drink old friends to trust and old authors to read.
Sir Francis Bacon
Even though consciousness doesn’t seem to be confined to the human brain within the skull, we do experience consciousness through our brain. The transformation of consciousness to attention is facilitated by your brain. Driving thoughts into action is also processed by your brain. Your brain is the seat of the creative observer inside you.
Ilchi Lee
Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.
William H. Gass
Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
G.K. Chesterton
Wisdom is knowing you know nothing
Socrates
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.
Voltaire
Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Livin' ain't livin' if your livin' ain't givin'.
T.F. Hodge
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I wonder whether the Christmas feeling has anything to do with the sixth sense. Perhaps we're a little more the angels at Christmas than we are during the rest of the year. And Christmas is about all the other senses. I can smell Christmas, I can taste Christmas, and I can see and hear it.
Jostein Gaarder
Break your shackles and reach out to your freedom. Break to pieces whatever indoctrination and programming that holds you hostage. The world is yours. Get possession of it.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming'; 'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue', and so on. And so also the men of the inner circle speak — the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But in their mouths" — and the policeman lowered his voice — "in their mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave. They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody.
G.K. Chesterton
We men are fascinated by the things we don't really understand. It gives us something to think and talk about: like females, they drive us nuts.
Criss Jami
Everybody would be a dictator if he could.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
So like a forgotten fire a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard
When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value.
Ivan Illich
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours.
Henry David Thoreau
There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English government in the East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as the history itself shews, had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women and children; that they left not a soul to breathe; expressions that are repeated over and over again in those books, and that too with exulting ferocity; are we sure these things are facts? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned those things to be done? Are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority?...The Bible tells us, that those assassinations were done by the express command of God. And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo every thing that is tender, sympathising, and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous, than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.
Thomas Paine
Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
Alain Badiou
A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.
Mencius
Reason is not always reasonable
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When reality is better than your dreams, stay awake.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
Peter Sloterdijk
Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
God gives His deepest discernment and sharpest marksmanship to men who aim to expose His truth before an enemy's lies.
Criss Jami
Every time we turn to Christ in faith it is like a moment of Sabbath, a little foretaste of eternal rest and glory. The gift of that moment lies not in what we do but what we receive. It is the holy time set aside to receive the greatest gift of God ever has to give, which is himself, in his own beloved Son.
Phillip Cary
To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one's self.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
Don't fear mistakes, they are your stepping stone to success
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves.
Chris Matakas
Superiority is always detested.
Baltasar Gracián
Don't be afraid of marrying the right person even if they come from the wrong background.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.
Michel de Montaigne