Quotes by Philosophers - Page 191

For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation.
Plato
Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views - then the world will be governed.
Zhuangzi
Only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others.
Seneca
Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.
Jean-Paul Sarte
Once you transcend the external differences, anything can be merged with anything.
Liezi
Death follows stagnation
T.F. Hodge
The rewards of faith are beyond doubt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A sword can only pierce the body, but love can pierce the soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.
Elbert Hubbard
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
Slavoj Žižek
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Albert Camus
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A strong ant is better than a weak lion.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
John Rawls
If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
George Santayana
Joy turns tears into laughter.Hope turns mourning into gladness.Wisdom turns tragedy into fortune.Faith turns defeat into triumph.Love turns enmity into friendship.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Perhaps it is true that, by some definitions, Satan is more religious than God. Many of the particularly proud sinners are deceived into thinking that Satan is anti-religious, that he likes seeing people do immoral things simply because he likes immoral things. Doubtful; Satan likes for people to do immoral things so that he can blame them for doing immoral things. The Father of Lies laughs not with his teammates, but at them.
Criss Jami
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.
Hannah Arendt
If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsberg warns youdont follow my pathto extinction
Allen Ginsberg
One who has great faith has great power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid but which none have a right to expect
Rousseau Jean-Jacques 1712-1778
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
Stanisław Lem
Create answers where there are questions.Create solutions where there are problems.Create advantages where there are obstacles.Create opportunities where there are roadblocks.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Some people are like an open grave:You give it the thing you love mostAnd then get nothing in return.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.
Elbert Hubbard
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
... each gratification points to the ultimate one, and that all happiness has some connection with eternal beatitude. Some connection, if only this: that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy. It is immediately evident that such satisfactions are not enough; they are not what we have really sought; they cannot really satisfy us at all.
Josef Pieper
I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
Umberto Eco
In large States public education will always be extremely mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is at best only mediocre.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If you want peace, prepare for ideological war with those who want others to prepare for physical war.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
... while we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.
Roger Scruton
We are currently too attached to our worldly toys, rather than to the lessons our playing could impart to further the maturity of our collective soul.
Ilchi Lee
But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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. Then when you're no longer thinking ahead each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the
Cornel West
Chomie' is South African homosexual men’s unofficial name.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Souls from the same star find it impossible to resist dancing to the tune of inevitability.
T.F. Hodge
men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.
Baruch Spinoza
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
Robert M. Pirsig
A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?
Ayn Rand
Carving your own path gets you to greatness quicker than following someone else's trail.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.
Voltaire
Many quote scripture, less study it, and even fewer live it. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars...
Oswald Spengler
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous Huxley
The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint.
Charles Eisenstein
... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber
It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.
Friedrich A. Hayek
There is no other space, no other time. This moment is all. In this moment the whole existence converges, in this moment all is available.
Osho
Every man is a poet when he is in love.
Plato
The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.
Fazlur Rahman
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
Albert Camus
She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Albert Camus
Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.
Osho
Don't wait for wisdom to come and rescue you, seek it daily.
Matshona Dhliwayo