Quotes by Philosophers - Page 203

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seeds are proof that God puts within you what is supposed to enrich the world around you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your love is as stable as you are: It's not about how good a person makes you feel, but rather what good you can do for them.
Criss Jami
CAPITALISM: If everything worked without need of repair, upgrade or replacement, then peaceful minds and prosperity would prevail among the masses rather than just the few who control markets.
T.F. Hodge
The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
Simone de Beauvoir
Being in a hurry is the father of stress and worry.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are requiered for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual... Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude - the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are good in the chrysalis.
Elbert Hubbard
Some people think they are holier than othersSome religions think they are the only true onesSome gods think they are the most divineSome races think they are a superior breedThe war goes on to the grave and beyond
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...
Marcus Aurelius
The more specifically you define your goals the more attainable they become.
Chris Matakas
Of all our infirmities the most savage is to despise our being.
Michel de Montaigne
If roses tried to be sunflowers, they would lose their beauty; and if sunflowers tried to be roses, they would lose their strength.
Matshona Dhliwayo
However much we would adore the past it will forever die in the future with us.
Sorin Cerin
To be is to do.
Immanuel Kant
We preoccupy ourselves with what we had — or what we want to have — at the expense of what we have.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.
Ayn Rand
At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.
Confucius
People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin
Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.
Criss Jami
Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.
Aristotle
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
G.K. Chesterton
You are strong because of what you overcame, brave because of what you defeated, fierce because of what you mastered, and powerful because of what you conquered.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today.
Lars Iyer
I have furnished myself with a Bible and Testament; and I can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in any thing, in the former part of the Age of Reason, it has been by speaking better of some parts than they deserved.
Thomas Paine
Divine determination and decree is this: that God has foreordained all people without exception unto eternal life, for his love is unconditional.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Listen to the advice of your own Destiny! All is a given!
Sorin Cerin
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Simone de Beauvoir
The highest prayers lift you out of the lowest places.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A society whose members are helpless need idols.
Erich Fromm
What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?
U.G. Krishnamurti
Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who perseveres to the end.
Plato
Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego.
Peter Rollins
What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.
Henry David Thoreau
The few individuals who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
Ortega y Gasset José
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
Rabindranath Tagore
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Stanisław Lem
Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.
Criss Jami
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.
Niccolò Machiavelli
In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.
John Mark Reynolds
Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.
Søren Kierkegaard
Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of -- for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
Socrates
What comes from the heart goes to the heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God save me from fools with a little philosophy—no one is more difficult to reach.
Epictetus
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.
Robert M. Pirsig
Recalibration comes from experiencing Nothingness, being open to emptiness as the ultimate reality and our nature. It is the purest mind, the Energy-Consciousness itself.
Ilchi Lee
I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it.
Chris Matakas
Holding onto your dreams is better than holding onto your nightmares.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.
Slavoj Žižek
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
Henry David Thoreau
For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.
Muriel Barbery
The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.
Confucius
The darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas was incorporated into the Nazi belief system. Part of the link was straightforward: some things Nietzsche said were pure Nazi doctrine. His comments that ‘The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction’ and that ‘the tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate’ could come from any work on racial hygiene. Nietzsche’s central contribution was not these explicitly Social Darwinist views, but his rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Self-creation required hardness towards oneself: a strong will imposing coherence on conflicting impulses. It also requires hardness on others. Conflicts between the self-creative projects of different people made inevitable the attempt to dominate others. The whole of life was a struggle in which victory went to the brave and to the strong-willed. Noble human qualities, linked with the will to power, were brought out in combat but atrophied in peace. Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison. In drawing these consequences from his beliefs about the death of God and from Social Darwinism, Nietzsche provided the part of the Nazi belief system which ‘justified’ the cruel steps they took to implement their other beliefs.
Jonathan Glover
Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers.
Socrates
A ship that sails without a compass will get lost at sea.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I lack nothing, I tell you!”“Nothing?” I asked. “Not even heaven?”He lowered his head and was silent. But after a moment:“Heaven is too high for me. The earth is good, exceptionally good–and near me!”“Nothing is nearer to us than heaven. The earth is beneath our feet and we tread upon it, but heaven is within us.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Much blood has been spilled over words, and a great deal of it over the word ‘God.’ (125)
Jean-Yves Leloup
A knife is cutlery in one hand and a weapon in another.
Matshona Dhliwayo