Quotes by Philosophers - Page 175

Success sits on a mountain of mistakes
Bangambiki Habyarimana
With the muscles of our body, we can lift and move heavy things. With the muscle of integrity, we can turn intention into powerful action. That’s how we can earn trust from our conscience, and can truly believe in ourselves.
Ilchi Lee
Love your friends with your eyes closed, but love your enemies with both eyes open.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You are a product of your mind, a result of your thoughts, and a consequence of your actions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Pain teaches you more than pleasure. Failure teaches you more than success. Poverty teaches you more than prosperity. Adversity teaches you more than comfort.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
René Descartes
It is not unreasonable to want repentance from a wrongdoer before forgiving that wrongdoer, since, in the absence of repentance, hasty forgiveness may harm both the forgiver and the wrongdoer. The forgiver may be harmed by a failure to show self-respect. The wrongdoer may be harmed by being deprived of an important incentive - the desire to be forgiven - that could move him toward repentance and moral rebirth.
Jeffrie G. Murphy
In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Adam Smith
What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.
Augustine of Hippo
A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
Augustine of Hippo
That government is best which governs least.
Thomas Paine
Nothing is pure and entire of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. A universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence.
David Hume
Life is about discovering things worth dying for.
Criss Jami
What you conquer in your soul you conquer in your world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A tuna can only boast in a pond, but a whale can boast even in the ocean.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
Cornel West
Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Art is whatever you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan
It is left only to God and to the angels to be lookers on.
Francis Bacon
As a rose blossoms despite being surrounded by thorns, bloom despite being surrounded by troubles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
Michael Oakeshott
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
..it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!
Aldous Huxley
Now I realize, of course, that many readers will acknowledge that we do in fact have these reactions, but would nevertheless write them off as mere reactions. “Our tendency to find something personally disgusting,” they will sniff, “doesn’t show that there is anything objectively wrong with it.” This is the sort of stupidity-masquerading-as-insight that absolutely pervades modern intellectual life, and it has the same source as so many other contemporary intellectual pathologies: the abandonment of the classical realism of the great Greek and Scholastic philosophers, and especially of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes.
Edward Feser
If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.
Isaiah Berlin
The Dutch fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that the blacks and whites are all children of one father, whom they call Adam. As for me, I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are.
Voltaire
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances.
Umberto Eco
If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.
Confucius
Awareness in its pure state is nonlocal; there’s no focal point in it. It is unbounded. Awareness, when managed and directed, becomes attention. By turning into attention, awareness becomes localized, and attains a focal point. Because of this feature, attention has the power to direct energy.
Ilchi Lee
There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Great leaders do not shift responsibility even if it means acknowledging their own failures.
Gift Gugu Mona
Perceptual fields are limited by the attractor patterns that they're associated with. This means that the capacity to recognize significant factors in a given situation is limited by the context that arises from the level of consciousness of the observer. The motive of the viewer automatically determines what is seen; causality is, therefore, ascribed to factors that are, in fact, a function of the biases of the observer and aren't at all instrumental in the situation itself.
David Hawkins
All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
J.M. Bernstein
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.
Boethius
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.
Albert Camus
All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius
These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.
Colin Wilson
Water has no hands,but carries great ships.Air has no shoulders,but carries large planes.The Sun has no eyes,but finds its way around the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Lewis Mumford
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Henry David Thoreau
I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.Actively relating to the Church's prayer and sacraments is not done through ideas. Any Catholic today who has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church: that's meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.
Marshall McLuhan
There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.
Albert Camus
When the Rabbis stated that obedience or disobedience to the commandments depends not on the will of Hashem but on man’s free will, they echoed Jeremiah, who said, “Out of the mouth of the Most High there comes neither the bad nor the good” (Lamentations 3:38). By the bad he meant vice, and by the good he intended virtue, meaning that Hashem does not predetermine any person as bad or good. Since this is so, a person owes it to himself to mourn his sins and transgressions, since he has committed them of his own free will, as Jeremiah says, “For what should a living man mourn? Let every man mourn because of his sins” (Lamentations 3:39). Jeremiah answers his question positively, telling us that the remedy for our disease lies with us. Just as our failings stemmed from our own free will, so do we have the power to repent of our evil deeds.
Maimonides
Like any organic entity, a system of consciousness manifests itself through the orderly, differentiated development of a certain unifying reality.
Kitarō Nishida
You win minds through your brilliance. You win hearts through your tenderness. You win souls through your benevolence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.
Paulo Freire
The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence.
Peter Singer
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
Begin with another's to end with your own.
Baltasar Gracián
No man will swim ashore and take his baggage with him.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca