Quotes by Philosophers - Page 207

fear in sooth holds so in check all mortals, becasue thay see many operations go on in earth and heaven, the causes of which they can in no way understand, believing them therefore to be done by power divine. for these reasons when we shall have seen that nothing can be produced from nothing, we shall then more correctly ascertain that which we are seeking, both the elements out of which every thing can be produced and the manner in which every thing can be produced in which all things are done without the hands of the gods.
Titus Lucretius Carus
For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude—and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone—cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.
José Ortega y Gasset
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
Aristotle
But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.
Immanuel Kant
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
Social networking platforms drove man closer to those in neighboring continents, while driving him further apart from those in his neighborhood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.
Jan Zwicky
True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.
Allan Bloom
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
Alain de Botton
Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.
Ayn Rand
As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.
Paulo Freire
Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
Noam Chomsky
People, generally, are equally insecure. They just show it (or hide it) differently.
Criss Jami
As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Do not say "It is morning " and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.
Rabindranath Tagore
He alone is a man who keeps his word:Not that he has one thing in the heart, and another on the tongue.
Guru Gobind Singh
It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.
Ayn Rand
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of U.S.A. - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.
Julius Evola
A path is made by walking on it.
Zhuangzi
The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.
Elbert Hubbard
Karma and Hell are the cowards revenge
Christopher Zzenn Loren
Live every day as if they last.
Marcus Aurelius
Do not use your energy except for a cause more noble than yourself. Such a cause cannot be found except in Almighty God Himself: to preach the truth, to defend womanhood, to repel humiliation which your Creator has not imposed upon you, to help the oppressed. Anyone who uses his energy for the sake of the vanities of the world is like someone who exchanges gemstones for gravel. There is no nobility in anyone who lacks faith. The wise man knows that the only fitting price for his soul is a place in Paradise...
Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi
A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There's great peace in surrendering to principles
Stefan Molyneux
Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.
Criss Jami
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
G.K. Chesterton
He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…
Aldous Huxley
No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Colin Wilson
The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children.
Stefan Molyneux
The ingenerating of a principle of grace in the soul seems in Scripture to be compared to the conceiving of Christ in the womb... And the conception of Christ in the womb of the blessed virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost, seems to be a designed resemblance of the conception of Christ in the soul of a believer by the power of the same Holy Ghost.
Jonathan Edwards
There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.
Augustine of Hippo
It is possible to draw a straight line with a crooked pencil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.
Robert M. Pirsig
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
The rich take life one financial year at a time. The poor take life one meal at a time.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.
Mikhail Bakhtin
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau
A diamond only truly appreciates pressure the day it begins to shine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
by indignities men come to dignities
Francis Bacon
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.
G.K. Chesterton
It is easy to take a stand about a remote issue, but speciesists, like racists, reveal their true nature when the issue comes nearer home. To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, or the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.
Peter Singer
Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?
Plato
Passion is the driving element of purpose. When one is possessed with it, labor is not perceived as toil - it is revealed as love.
T.F. Hodge
A woman either loves or hates: she knows no medium.
Syrus
We think we like or love some people until we see them regularly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
God sent his beloved creatures to Datça for them to live longer.
Strabo
There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes.
Edward Stein
We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
The very fact that you can observe this thinking mind is proof that you are not this thinking mind.
Chris Matakas
I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A woman’s beauty is worth little to you, a woman’s intelligence is worth much to you, a woman’s virtue is worth more to you, a woman’s love is worth the most to you, and a woman’s loyalty is worth everything to you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
Noam Chomsky