Quotes by Philosophers - Page 192

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love.
Adam Smith
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
G.K. Chesterton
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
G.K. Chesterton
Making God a man is the consolation prize that our forefathers gave themselves for not being the ones who were each blessed with a vagina.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
True inner righteousness does not judge according to custom but by the measure of the most perfect law of God Almighty by which the mores of various places and times were adapted to those places and times.
Augustine of Hippo
Soul power supersedes mind power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.
Baruch Spinoza
Look around your competitors and learn from them.Look within for your talents and exploit them.Look back at your failures and learn from them.Look forward to your successes and reach for them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Beware of people who tell you it can't be done. They want to remain on the market alone
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
Baltasar Gracián
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions
Albert Camus
As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage. When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.
John Locke
The only way to consistently perform at your potential is to ask: Am I better than I was yesterday?
Chris Matakas
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
John Cage
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.
Martha Nussbaum
Need will send you even into the arms of your enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
Muriel Barbery
I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.
Søren Kierkegaard
The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin!
Peter Kreeft
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Where they come in the perpetual spirit of giving - the house that love built.
T.F. Hodge
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something, and it is only such love that can know freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Eric Hoffer
One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.
Albert Camus
Während Wissenschaftler wissen, dass sie nur etwas "glauben" (= für "wahr" halten), was heute angemessen erscheint, morgen aber möglicherweise schon überholt ist, glauben Gläubige, etwas zu wissen, was auch morgen noch gültig sein soll, obwohl es in der Regel schon heute widerlegt ist.
Michael Schmidt-Salomon
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.
Aristotle
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In reality, I am not dependent, butSo as to keep dignity of the GenerousI have resorted to beggary.
Bedil
What is evil neither can nor should be loved; for it is not one’s duty to be a lover of evil or to become like what is bad; and we have said that like is dear to like. Must the friendship, then, be forthwith broken off? Or is this not so in all cases, but only when one’s friends are incurable in their wickedness? If they are capable of being reformed one should rather come to the assistance of their character or their property, inasmuch as this is better and more characteristic of friendship. But a man who breaks off such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing strange; for it was not to a man of this sort that he was a friend; when his friend changed, therefore, and he is unable to save him, he gives him up.
Aristotle
Whenever I feel like exercise I lie down until the feeling passes.
Robert M. Hutchins
Beauty is unbearable drives us to despair offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.
Jonathan Glover
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K. Chesterton
The most reliable friend you have is your shadow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.
Aldous Huxley
Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse and saved by good will.
Criss Jami
The sweetest fruits grow at the top of a tree so that only those who deserve them can reach them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.
Stefan Molyneux
... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.
Jean-François Lyotard
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Alan W. Watts
Blushing is the color of virtue.
Diogenes of Sinope
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries -old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco
Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.
Baruch Spinoza
If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.
Chris Matakas
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A sign of power in a man is not only when people follow what he suggests, but also when people make a conscious effort to do the exact opposite of what he suggests.
Criss Jami
At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
Building castles in the air is only wise if you build a ladder to reach them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Whether your glass is half full or half empty, hope can fill it up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
G.K. Chesterton
A child, obeying his father and mother, goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north. And the yin and yang - how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, if I should refuse to obey them, how perverse I would be! What fault is it of theirs? The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death. When a skilled smith is casting metal, if the metal should leap up and say, 'I insist upon being made into a Moye!' he would surely regard it as very inauspicious metal indeed. Now, having had the audacity to take on human form once, if I should say, 'I don't want to be anything but a man! Nothing but a man!', the Creator would surely regard me as a most inauspicious sort of person. So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the Creator as a skilled smith. Where could he send me that would not be all right? I will go off to sleep peacefully, and then with a start I will wake up.
Zhuangzi
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
Giacomo Leopardi
Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and excessive, with the excess as the form of appearance of the lack. On the one hand, sexuality is characterized by the universal capacity to provide the metaphorical meaning or innuendo of any activity or object–any element, including the most abstract reflection can be experienced as ‘alluding to that‘ (suffice it to recall the proverbial example of the adolescent who, in order to forget his sexual obsessions, takes refuge in pure mathematics and physics–whatever he does here again reminds him of ‘that’: how much volume is needed to fill out an empty cylinder? How much energy is discharged when two bodies collide?…). The universal surplus–this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience…is not the sign of preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.
Slavoj Žižek
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
Paulo Freire