Quotes by Philosophers - Page 186

Every single living thing is food to at least one living thing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.
Blaise Pascal
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.
Josef Pieper
Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.
Ayn Rand
Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.
Allan Bloom
And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
Albert Camus
Knowledge is the eldest daughter of wisdom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together
Luce Irigaray
Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
Alain de Botton
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics,you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain de Botton
In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)- all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.
Michel Foucault
Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, "I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'("Queen Fantasque")
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you want to know your true opinion of someone watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In love, one and one are one.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
We are not self-caused little gods.
Sam Harris
Every organism requires an environment of friends partly to shield it from violent changes and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
The heart of the home beats in the kitchen and a healthy one beats three times a day
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Sometimes the rope seems the only option when at the bottom of the pit. Climb it to safety.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.
A.C. Grayling
At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other's mode of expression to varying degrees, etc.
Antonio Gramsci
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
Michel de Montaigne
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius
Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H. Gass
Be the friend you wish to have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A totally new kind of education is needed in the world. The person who is born to be a poet is proving himself stupid in mathematics and the person who could have been a great mathematician is just cramming history and feeling lost. Everything is topsy-turvy because education is not according to your nature: it does not pay any respect to the individual. It forces everybody into a certain pattern.
Osho
The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.
Mary Daly
Follow your dreams, not the crowd.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain de Botton
Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.
William A. Dembski
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
Voltaire
When it occurs without having to voice it - vibin' on the same page, flowin' on the same wave, soakin' up the same light rays.
T.F. Hodge
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
Alan W. Watts
The promise of hope provides more comfort than the limitations of doubt.
T.F. Hodge
It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.
Seneca
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin
We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.
Mario Bunge
If a supernatural being is to be exempt from natural law, it cannot possess specific, determinate characteristics. These attributes would impose limits and these limits would restrict the capacities of this supernatural being. In this case, a supernatural being would be subject to the causal relationships that mark natural existence, which would disqualify it as a god. Therefore, we must somehow conceive of a being without a specific nature, a being that is indeterminate—a being, in other words, that is nothing in particular. But these characteristics (or, more precisely, lack of characteristics) are incompatible with the notion of existence itself.
George H. Smith
The source of all light is in the eye.
Alan W. Watts
You don't need a great cathedral for a great marriage. All you need is fate to be on your side
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is not solely or chiefly in virtue of the divine image that man effectively resembles God, but in virtue of his consciousness of being an image and the movement whereby the soul, passing in a way through itself, avails itself of the factual resemblance in order to attain to God.
Étienne Gilson
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
Henry David Thoreau
Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.
Confucius
And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
Stefan Molyneux
Death means nothing to us
Epicurus
I call [fourth-wave feminism] fainting–couch feminism, a la the delicate Victorian ladies who retreated to an elegant chaise when overcome with emotion. As an equality feminist from the 1970s, I am dismayed by this new craze. Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism—and for women.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Etre dans le vent, c'est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes.
Jean Guitton
If you want to rise, drop everyone that is weighing you down.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Learning isn't acquiring knowledge so much as it is trimming information that has already been acquired.
Criss Jami
Honor is the reward of virtue.
Cicero