Quotes by Philosophers - Page 173

Speak well of the sun, but know that it can harm you;when enraged, it is pitiless. Speak well of the ocean, but know that it can injure you; when angry, it is merciless. Speak well of the wind, but know that it can wound you; when provoked, it is ruthless.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Anger or rage (mênis, thumos, orgê) is an emotion, a mixture of belief and desire. It is not a somatic feeling, as nausea and giddiness are, though it is usually accompanied by such feelings – trembling and blushing, for example, and the sense of seeing red. It is, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘a desire, accompanied by pain, to take apparent revenge for apparent insult’.
C. D. C. Reeve
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx
The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.
Publilius Syrus
Watering a dead flower will not bring it back to life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The ending can only start with the beginning and end with self estrangement, as to become once again his own/old self. This is why every man is a continuous ending.
Sorin Cerin
If you throw ice at the sun, it will melt; if you throw spears, they will burn; and if you throw bricks, they will crumble. The sun is invincible; all that comes before it is consumed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Take full account of what Excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.
Marcus Aurelius
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.
Hannah Arendt
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.
Rudolf Carnap
The highest wisdom is continual cheerfulness such a state like the region above the moon is always clear and serene.
Michel de Montaigne
Society is a voluntary scheme of mutual benefit. The state is a compulsory scheme of mutual exploitation.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Political success in Athens seemed to depend on having a party, and there seemed now to be no party with whom an honorable man could connect himself.
Irwin Edman
Ordinary people think you are crazy when you attempt the impossible, deride you when you are halfway to achieving it, and envy you when you achieve it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Language is the light of the mind.
John Stuart Mill
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If there is anything that can be called genius it consists chiefly in the ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
Thomas Reid
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
G.K. Chesterton
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
Mark Fisher
Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.
Aristotle
Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.
Noam Chomsky
The problem with our society today is that when things fall apart we do remember to call upon the Lord, but when God answers our prayers we are too quick to exclude Him from those answered prayers.
Gift Gugu Mona
I believe emotional suppression fueled by a shamed imagination lies at the root of society's ailments. It is the believing leaders of religion that keep the “denial circus” going decade after decade. We have, for too long, supported this tyranny of delusion. We have given the guru and the preacher the stage one too many times. It is time to wake up and replace the preacher with the human teacher—a human who is the intelligence of their whole organism.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.
Alan W. Watts
There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.
Peter Singer
Imagine that the keeper of a huge, strong beast notices what makes it angry, what it desires, how it has to be approached and handled, the circumstances and the conditions under which it becomes particularly fierce or calm, what provokes its typical cries, and what tones of voice make it gentle or wild. Once he's spent enough time in the creature's company to acquire all this information, he calls it knowledge, forms it into a systematic branch of expertise, and starts to teach it, despite total ignorance, in fact, about which of the creature's attitudes and desires is commendable or deplorable, good or bad, moral or immoral. His usage of all these terms simply conforms to the great beast's attitudes, and he describes things as good or bad according to its likes and dislikes, and can't justify his usage of the terms any further, but describes as right and good the things which are merely indispensable, since he hasn't realised and can't explain to anyone else how vast a gulf there is between necessity and goodness.
Plato
The ancient teaching of Tao tells us that knowing what you really are is wisdom, and living it is virtue.
Ilchi Lee
To swallow gudgeons ere they're catch'd And count their chickens ere they're hatch'd.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again."One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
G.K. Chesterton
If only they let me, I'll go right into the dense forest where you can't find your way. And where the honey-sipping hummingbird rocks himself on the end of the thinnest branch, I will flower out as a champa.
Rabindranath Tagore
Just as it is knownThat an image of one's face is seenDepending on a mirrorBut does not really exist as a face,So the conception of "I" existsDependent on mind and body,But like the image of a faceThe "I" does not at all exist as its own reality.
Nāgārjuna
Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Dallas Willard
The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de La Bruyère
Use your tears to water the garden of your dreams.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who looks for advantage out of friendship strips it all of its nobility.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?
Jonathan Edwards
Extremes meet and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Seeking higher ground is not a destination, but an elevation. Wings up, eyes shut open.
T.F. Hodge
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
Every revolution starts with the aim to help the poor, but when the poor get it they forget who they were and become the new oppressors. The cycle goes on forever
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
Jean de La Bruyère
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, followsthe same law: all colors are affected in the first place,and lose theirsaturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four andsoon to two colors; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached,although the pathological color is never identifiable with any normalone. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in thechange to a less differentiated and more primitive structure’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live behind the closed doors of our own destiny.
Sorin Cerin
Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.
Muriel Barbery
The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth's denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.
Epicurus
It is not the size of the candle that matters, but the size of its light.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than anyone else.
Arrian
Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered." (Bk2:8)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
Thomas Carlyle
Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.
Alice von Hildebrand
Almost any established decision procedure is better than a resort to force; for when force is used, people get hurt and the desire for retaliation is likely to lead to more violence. Moreover, most decision procedures produce results at least as beneficial and just as a resort to force.
Peter Singer
One should hold fast one's heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one's head run away!
Friedrich Nietzsche