Quotes by Philosophers - Page 194

The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.
Criss Jami
I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is they would say if they are honest that it is a big department store with new things every week - all the money to buy them and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
Erich Fromm
As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.
Criss Jami
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
If you listen to critics for too long, you will become deaf to success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Allow the heart to empty itself of all turmoil! Retrieve the utter tranquility of the mind from which you issued.Although all forms are dynamic,and we all grow and transform,each of us is compelled to return to our root. Our root is quietude.
Lao Tzu
Hard work is the bridge between success and your dreams.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The seer does not see, by choice, what the blind can see by default... from within.
T.F. Hodge
We are loved way more by some of the people who have not contacted us in the last twelve or so months than we are loved by some of those who contact us every twelve or so days … or hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.
Aldous Huxley
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
G.K. Chesterton
Only an unsatisfied preference is bad. In other words, he argues that although it is good to have fulfilled whatever desires one might have, one is not better off having a fulfilled desire than having no desire at all. By way of example, consider the case in which we ‘paint the tree nearest to Sydney Opera house red and give Kate a pill that makes her wish that the tree nearest to Sydney Opera House were red’*. Professor Fehige plausibly denies that we do Kate any favour in doing this. She is no better off than had we done nothing. What matters is not that people have satisfied desires but that they do not have unsatisfied ones. It is the avoidance of frustration that is important.* Fehige, Christoph, ‘A Pareto Principle for Possible People’, 513–14.
David Benatar
We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.
Hierocles
Great sages began as great students.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be profitable, practice diligence.To be successful, practice excellence.To be influential, practice intelligence.To be honorable, practice prudence.To be blissful, practice kindness.To be joyful, practice goodness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I envision a world in which the vast majority of us are actively striving toward our potential by serving others through mediums we are most passionate.
Chris Matakas
Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing.
Stefan Molyneux
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
Albert Camus
We have seen, therefore, that I am not allowed even to *assume*, for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason *God, freedom, immortality*, unless at the same time *I deprive* speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insights. Reason, namely, in order to arrive at these, must employ principles which extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if in spite of this they are applied also to what cannot be an object of experience, actually always change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical *expansion* of pure reason impossible. Hence I had to suspend *knowledge* in order to make room for *belief*. For the dogmatism of metaphysics without a preceding critique of pure reason, is the source of all that disbelief which opposes morality and which is always very dogmatic." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 25-26
Immanuel Kant
Anarchy is law and freedom without force.Despotism is law and force without freedom.Barbarism force without freedom and law.Republicanism is force with freedom and law.
Immanuel Kant
I am a scholar of stupidity, so thanks for existing.
Carl William Brown
It isn't death, pain, exile or anything else you care to mention that accounts for the way we act, only our opinion about death, pain and the rest.
Epictetus
Anger is triggered by insult, then, and so is connected to worth (aretê) and to honour (timê). A person is insulted when the treatment he receives is worse than the treatment his worth entitles him to receive. He is honoured when he is given treatment proportional to his worth, and his worth is above or well-above average. When we speak of honour, therefore, we are in a way speaking of worth, since honour measures worth. Honour and insult are thus close to being polar opposites, and an insult is a harm to worth or honour.
C. D. C. Reeve
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.
Gaston Bachelard
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
G.K. Chesterton
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
Simone de Beauvoir
Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.
Muriel Barbery
Each day should be passed as though it were our last.
Publilius Syrus
The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A sage is a good teacher, but an even greater learner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another but what there is is very important.'
William James
Every child born in the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is this new to him as it was to the first that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.
Thomas Paine
Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir
Words make the intangible aspects of human experience communicable, and a single sentence can shatter our world view and assist us in the formulation of a new one.
Chris Matakas
We are the products of fate, from beginning to end
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Between friends there is no need of justice.
Aristotle
Many of us are literally prone to believing the most blatantly nonsensical untruths. There are some opinions and some beliefs so incredibly moronic, you actually feel stupid for not believing them; and it's probably because in giving the benefit of the doubt you self-doubt, you convince yourself into lame passivity and blind acceptance, you tell yourself, 'Maybe I'm just missing something here.
Criss Jami
Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical fun
Umberto Eco
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.
Criss Jami
Besides our eyes, skin and the other senses through which we receive the shadows of the exterior reality, we have a 'mental eye' (intelligence) with which we can perceive reality as it is.
Jesus Zamora Bonilla
Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously.
Aristotle
The cause of every anomaly can be found in woman.
G.I. Gurdjieff
When men do not forget what can be forgotten but forget what cannot be forgotten - that may be called true forgetting.
Zhuangzi
It's not at all hard to understand a person it's only hard to listen without bias.
Criss Jami
He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.
Umberto Eco
Many smiling faces hide a bleeding heart
Bangambiki Habyarimana
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.
Marquis de Sade
It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life.
G.K. Chesterton
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right
Miguel de Unamuno
Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one’s ignorance.To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of this great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.
George Spencer-Brown
You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
...we can choose to be truthful even when the choice means personal loss. We can choose to undertake a great action - unselfish, courageous, daringly creative - that looks unreasonable and irrational to the eye of the Ego.
Ilchi Lee
In the absence of any general inference from ‘A is a potential X’ to ‘A has the rights of an X’, we should not accept that a potential person should have the rights of a person, unless we can be given some specific reason why this should hold in this particular case.
Peter Singer
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything
Thomas Carlyle
As long as our ideas are the same, we will never be apart.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
Albert Camus
Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.
Criss Jami