Quotes by Philosophers - Page 19

A foolish son has no advantage over an orphan.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Water wrestles great opponents,but has no hands,and tramples great rivals,but has no feet.It slips through our fingers,but can swallow entire towns.Wind also slips through our fingers,but can swallow entire cities.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The ancients said that for persons who cultivated body and mind, and who are virtuous and honorable, death is an experience of liberation, a long-awaited rest from a lifetime of labors. Death helps the unscrupulous person to put an end to the misery of desire. Death, then, for everyone is a kind of homecoming. That is why the ancient sages speak of a dying person as a person who is 'going home.
Liezi
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain de Botton
The shrewd, like chameleons, embrace change by using it to their advantage.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It’s an evil fate to fall into the hands of a persecutor who was once persecuted.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.
Albert Camus
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T.F. Hodge
The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.
Immanuel Kant
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors Landor replies "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of stereotypes.
Criss Jami
...[A]ll the elements which belong to the notion of happiness are altogether empirical, that is, they must be borrowed from experience, and nevertheless the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances. Now it is impossible that the most clear-sighted and at the same time most powerful being (supposed finite) should frame to himself a definite conception of what he really wills in this. Does he will riches, how much anxiety, envy, and snares might he not thereby draw upon his shoulders? Does he will knowledge and discernment, perhaps it might prove to be only an eye so much the sharper to show him so much the more fearfully the evils that are now concealed from him and that cannot be avoided, or to impose more wants on his desires, which already give him concern enough. Would he have long life? Who guarantees to him that it would not be a long misery? Would he at least have health? How often has uneasiness of the body restrained from excesses into which perfect health would have allowed one to fall, and so on? In short, he is unable, on any principle, to determine with certainty what would make him truly happy; because to do so he would need to be omniscient.
Immanuel Kant
Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle
A flower does not lose its beauty because it grew on concrete.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
G.K. Chesterton
For a sane person to sincerely be happy that someone has succeeded, they have to either be profiting or likely to profit from that person’s success, or be that person.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Thomas Carlyle
God cannot resist love for He cannot resist Himself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Marriage and dating are man-made ideologies; if having a lover was a prerequisite to living, we’d all be born in pairs; as couples.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you cry in the rain, only the sky will see your tears.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the lesser prophets; and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together.
Thomas Paine
When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of "evil": the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.
Jerome A. Miller
Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry she carries them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
Henry David Thoreau
Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
Marcus Aurelius
It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.
Diogenes of Sinope
Skill is the bridge between success and great success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.
Alan W. Watts
The world rewards you for what is in your mind, the universe rewards you for what is in your heart, and the Heavens reward you for what is in your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Men argue. Nature acts.
Voltaire
What sort of charge against old age is the nearness of death, when this is shared by youth?Yes, you will say; but a young man expects to live long; an old man cannot expect to do so.Well, the young man is a fool to expect it. For what can be more foolish than to regard the uncertain as certain, the false as true? An old man has nothing even to hope. ' Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than the young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained:The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long.And yet! what is 'long' in a man's life? For grant the utmost limit: let us expect an age like that of the king of the Tartessi, who reigned eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty.Nothing seems long in which there is any . last' , for when that arrives, then all the past has slipped away -only that remains which you have earned by virtue and righteous actions.Hours indeed, and days and months and years depart, nor does past time ever return, nor can the future be known.Whatever time each is granted for life, with that he is bound to be content.
A.C. Grayling
One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Anything built on doubt is rocky.Anything built on fear is shaky.Anything built on hate is unsteady.Anything built on wisdom is trustworthy.Anything built on faith is sturdy.Anything built on love is mighty.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Better to rest in peace than rot in pieces
Bangambiki Habyarimana
your soul is sunken in that cowardice that bears down many men, turning their course and resolution by imagined perils, as his own shadow turns the frightened horse.
Dante Alighieri
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.
Stefan Molyneux
A bow is useless without an arrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Women are like shadows; when you chase them, they run from you; when you run from them, they chase you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.
Hermann Weyl
A rose does not lose sleep because it was mocked by weeds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
Let them spend their time condemning every action of persons they do not like; by this let them revoke their own condemnation licenses: no one will take them seriously when it comes time to condemn something that really needs to be condemned, and thus hear, hear, despite the excess noise, the reasonable voices may prevail.
Criss Jami
Rise above your fears and you rise above your world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property – and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No- if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes- if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value, only man’s fight against suffering is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim – is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.
Ayn Rand
As long as I can find hope in myself, there is hope for the future of the earth and the human race. If I fail to discover hope in myself, there is no hope for the earth or the human race. If I discover the goodness of human nature in myself, I can find it in the entire human race. If I fail to discover it in myself, I can’t expect it from anyone else, either.
Ilchi Lee
Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty.
Bertrand A. Russell
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
Susan Sontag
To believe your own thought to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.
Aldous Huxley
If you want to know how good a tree is, examine how many birds flock to feed off of its fruit.
Matshona Dhliwayo
This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness amounts to an existential — and “preventive” — refutation of the ideologies of doubt: if a man is able to doubt, it is because there is certainty; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality. It follows that there are necessarily some men who know reality and who therefore have certainty; and the great spokesmen of this knowledge and certainty are necessarily the best of men. For if truth were on the side of doubt, the individual who doubted would be superior not only to these spokesmen, who have not doubted, but also to the majority of normal men across the millennia of human existence. If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason, and man would be less than an animal, for the intelligence of animals does not doubt the reality to which it is proportioned.
Frithjof Schuon
Your educators can only be your liberators.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A society coming apart at top and bottom, or passing over into another form, contains just as many possibilities for revelation as a society running along smoothly in its own rut. The individual is thrust out of the sheltered nest that society has provided. He can no longer hide his nakedness by the old disguises. he learns how much of what he has taken for granted was by its own nature neither eternal nor necessary but thoroughly temporal and contingent. He learns that the solitude of the self is an irreducible dimension of human life no matter how completely that self had seemed to be contained in its social milieu. In the end, he sees each man as solitary and unsheltered before his own death. Admittedly, these are painful truths, but the most basic things are always learned with pain, since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, economic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded. What he learns has always been there, lying concealed beneath the surface of even the best-functioning societies; it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster. But so long as man does not have to face up to such a truth, he will not do so.
William Barrett
If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr