Quotes by Philosophers - Page 180

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
Robert M. Pirsig
It is impossible for love to enter your heart without leaving footprints on your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.
Immanuel Kant
He is not only idle who does nothing but he is idle who might be better employed.
Socrates
Smile more.Laugh more.Love more.Shine more.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To see what is right and not do it is want of courage.
Confucius
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.
William James
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. There is a deep-seated fear, in most people, of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; there is a longing for affection, which is often concealed by roughness, boorishness or a bullying manner in men, and by nagging and scolding in women. Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one.
Bertrand Russell
The reading of good books could soothe human stupidity, the problem is that human stupidity does not like to read.
Carl William Brown
Plus d'un qui n'a pu liberer ses propres chaines a su pourtant en liberer son ami.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart
You will not find joy out of fear, therefore eliminate every component of fear in your life if joy is what you need.
Gift Gugu Mona
The best trees produce the sweetest fruits.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook,The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.
Hildegard of Bingen
What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation.
Charles Eisenstein
REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
When you make choices, please remember: what is good for you but not good for others won’t be good for you either, eventually; what’s good for you and others but not good for the Earth won’t be good for you or others either, eventually; what’s good for you, others, and the Earth will be good for all.
Ilchi Lee
If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot set him to do nothing.
Blaise Pascal
(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.
Rebecca Goldstein
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
Albert Camus
But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.
Robert M. Pirsig
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
G.K. Chesterton
If all you have is money, you are among the poorest people in the world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton
There is an underlying unity in all things
Arthur Schopenhauer
If ever it's necessary to ride the bandwagon, it's done with one leg swinging out and eyes scoping the fields.
Criss Jami
...Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who’s painted a magnificent canvas—and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?”“What do you want? Perfection?”“—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.
Ayn Rand
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Politicians are not afraid of their mistakes, they are afraid their mistakes will not succeed
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are inflamed, by Thy Gift we are kindled; and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly, and go forwards. We ascend Thy ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly with Thy fire, with Thy good fire, and we go; because we go upwards to the peace of Jerusalem: for gladdened was I in those who said unto me, We will go up to the house of the Lord. There hath Thy good pleasure placed us, that we may desire nothing else, but to abide there for ever.
Augustine of Hippo
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.
Aristotle
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .
Emil M. Cioran
...[H]uman reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.
Immanuel Kant
Learn the principles, abide by the principles, and then dissolve the principles.
Bruce Lee
What's the first sign of a lurking, hidden expectation you didn't know you had? Pain! People don't do what we want, things don't happen quickly enough, the weather doesn't cooperate, our bodies don't cooperate. Why are these moments so painful? Because our minds are focused on a static, unchanging, me-centric picture while the dynamic unfolding of a broader life continues around us. There is nothing wrong with expectations per se, as it's appropriate to set goals and work, properly, towards their fruition. But the instant we feel pain over life not going "my way," our expectations have clearly taken an improper turn. Any moment you feel resistance or pain, look for -- and then let go of -- the hidden expectation. Practice giving yourself over to what "you" don't want. Let the line at the store be long. Let the other person interrupt you. Let the nervousness make you shake. Be where your body is, not where your mind is trying to take you.
Guy Finley
We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Where the old tracks are lost new country is revealed with its wonders.
Rabindranath Tagore
God created sages because He wanted to leave the light on in the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Spurn everything that is added by way of decoration and display by unneccesary labour. Relect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.
Seneca
space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.
Alain de Botton
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.
Isaiah Berlin
Imagine that one day you are out for a walk in the woods. Suddenly you see a small spaceship on the path in front of you. A tiny Martian climbs out the spaceship and stands on the ground looking up at you…What would you think? Never mind, it’s not important. But have you ever given any thought to the fact that you are a Martian yourself?It is obviously unlikely that you will ever stumble upon a creature from another planet. We do not even know that there is life on other planets. But you might stumble upon yourself one day. You might suddenly stop short and see yourself in a completely new light. On just such a walk in the woods. I am an extraordinary being, you think. I am a mysterious creature.You feel as if you are waking from an enchanted slumber. Who am I? you ask. You know that you are stumbling around on a planet in the universe. But what is the universe?If you discover yourself in this manner you will have discovered something as mysterious as the Martian we just mentioned. You will not only have seen a being from outer space. You will feel deep down that you are yourself an extraordinary being.
Jostein Gaarder
I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.
Baruch Spinoza
The divine essence itself is love and wisdom.
Emmanuel Swedenborg
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Albert Camus
The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
Henry David Thoreau
Augustine taught that true freedom is not choice or lack of constraint, but being what you are meant to be. Humans were created in the image of God. True freedom, then, is not found in moving away from that image but only in living it out.
Augustine of Hippo
So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
John Stuart Mill
If you're capable of despising your own behavior, you might just love yourself.
Criss Jami
I will ignore those who ridicule me.I will ignore those who undermine me.I will ignore those who undervalue me.I will ignore those who envy me.I will ignore those who disparage me.I will ignore those who betray me.I will ignore those who wrong me.I will embrace those who mentor me.I will embrace those who support me.I will embrace those who celebrate me.I will embrace those who improve me.I will embrace those who inspire me.I will embrace those who motivate me.I will embrace those who love me.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
To some believers, being on the pill or using a condom is a nonverbal way of telling God to go to hell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
A lion's strength does not lie in its roar.
Matshona Dhliwayo