Quotes by Philosophers - Page 200

A virtuous spouse adds years to your life, a wise one adds decades, but a loving one adds an eternity to your life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.
Henry David Thoreau
Visibility is a trap.
Michel Foucault
Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil.
Criss Jami
Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.
Stanisław Lem
We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Systems and processes will always surpass motivation.
Chris Matakas
Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?
Ayn Rand
Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned.
Criss Jami
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Karl R. Popper
We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.
Ayn Rand
...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
Frantz Fanon
Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows. This childhood in the mists and glimmers, this life in the slowness of limbo gives us a certain layer of births. What a lot of beings we have begun! What a lot of lost springs which have nevertheless, flowed! Reverie toward our past then, reverie looking for childhood seems to bring back lives which which have never taken place, lives which have been imagined. Reverie is a mnemonics of the imagination. In reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destitute has not been able to make use of.
Gaston Bachelard
To be knowledgeable, sit before scholars; to be wise, sit before life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A lion is only dangerous if it has teeth.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Friends will not only live in harmony but in melody.
Henry David Thoreau
The biggest melon started off a small seed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.
Eric Hoffer
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Will Durant
We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.
Jostein Gaarder
He was a wise man who invented God.
Plato
The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.
Stefan Molyneux
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine
Whatever you search for will either meet you halfway or wait for you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
Iris Murdoch
A legendary horse is praised not for its strength, but for its Integrity.
Confucius
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
Sam Harris
The best of all leaders is the one who helps people so that eventually they don’t need him.
Lao Tzu
Vairâgya or renunciation is the turning point in all the various Yogas. The Karmi (worker) renounces the fruits of his work. The Bhakta (devotee) renounces all little loves for the almighty and omnipresent love. The Yogi renounces his experiences, because his philosophy is that the whole Nature, although it is for the experience of the soul, at last brings him to know that he is not in Nature, but eternally separate from Nature. The Jnâni (philosopher) renounces everything, because his philosophy is that Nature never existed, neither in the past, nor present, nor will It in the future.
Swami Vivekananda
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
Emil M. Cioran
One of the dangers of the spiritual story is that it disassociates humans from reality. Relieving world hunger, crime and suffering are replaced with fantasies of other worlds, dimensions, gods or forces that will magically take care of humanities plight. I once asked a metaphysical friend of mine what she thought of rape. She replied, “People choose these experiences before birth to learn human lessons of rape.” I asked her about world hunger, sex trafficking, genocide, and torture, and she replied with the same logic. At that moment, I realized the dangerous implications of esoteric ideology in our world.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.
Epictetus
I have observed on board a steamer how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.
Rabindranath Tagore
Impulse without reason is not enough and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.
Jerome A. Miller
Love in the rain is better than hate in the sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.
Blaise Pascal
Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear - they do one harm after they're past and gone, not merely when they're in prospect. Even when they're over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal's anxiety doesn't end with the commission of the crime, even if it's undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don't do one any harm, they're fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.
Seneca
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the “real woman”; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.
Simone de Beauvoir
Perhaps a seemingly dull, boring person is not a person who lacks personality, but rather a person with so much personality most other things bore them.
Criss Jami
No one ever did anything worth doing unless he was prepared to go on with it long after it became something of a bore.
Douglas V. Steere
Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all.
Alan W. Watts
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Even if you are not evil, pretend to be. It will put off some abuse
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.
Noam Chomsky
To be rich is not the end but only a change of worries.
Epicurus
Anyone who has ever achieved anything has been a steward of his potential.
Chris Matakas
This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion
Jean Baudrillard
And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name.
Seneca
Youth is a blind incongruous beast. It craves food but does not eat, is too timid to eat; it need simply nod to happiness, which strolls by on the street and would willingly stop, but it does not nod; it turns the faucet, permitting time to drain away uselessly and be lost, as though time were water. A beast that does not know it is a beast - such is youth. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Arthur Schopenhauer
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.
Erich Fromm
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
Nicholas Murray Butler
All incoming bits of information have, simultaneously, a tentacular, optic, and sexual dimension. Its world is not doubtful, but surprising; vampyroteuthic thinking is an unbroken stream of Aristotelian shock.
Vilém Flusser