Quotes by Philosophers - Page 208

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction.
Henry David Thoreau
I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.—But there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: "Dwarf! Thou! Or I!"—For courage is the best slayer,—courage which attacketh: for in every attack there is sound of triumph.Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby hath he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph hath he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.Courage slayeth also giddiness at abysses: and where doth man not stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself—seeing abysses?Courage is the best slayer: courage slayeth also fellow-suffering. Fellow-suffering, however, is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man looketh into life, so deeply also doth he look into suffering.Courage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: "Was that life? Well! Once more!
Friedrich Nietzsche
When in trouble, run to God. When in pain, dwell in His presence. When you don't know what to say or do, ask God and for every moment praise God. He is always by your side!
Gift Gugu Mona
What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.
Peter Sloterdijk
Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in our society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members. How can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population? I believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.
Jean Vanier
Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.
Friedrich Schiller
Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.
Criss Jami
An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Stop blaming evil on the Devil, blame it on the Creator of everything, if you don't understand, ask Him or at least hope that someday He will reveal it to you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Books are for nothing but to inspire
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.
Walter Benjamin
Chese now," quod she, "oon of thise thynges tweye:To han me foul and old til that I deye,And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,And nevere yow displese in al my lyf,Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,And take youre aventure of the repairThat shal be to youre hous by cause of me,Or in som oother place, may wel be.Now chese yourselven, wheither that yow liketh.
Geoffrey Chaucer
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?
Anaximenes
The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.
José Ortega y Gasset
The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.
Criss Jami
He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force...
Robert M. Pirsig
God has been FAITHFUL to me, that why I have FAITH in Him.
Gift Gugu Mona
What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.
Criss Jami
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
If adventurers were cowardly, no one would have crossed the nations; if sailors were fearful, no one would have crossed the oceans; if pilots were gutless, no one would have crossed the skies.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.
David Hume
Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.
Marcus Aurelius
We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young -- not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age -- and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The greatest prison in the universe is an ignorant mind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We will never outrun the nagging of original divinely inspired purpose.
T.F. Hodge
It is important to realize that we so often define ourselves by what is in opposition to ourselves.
Chris Matakas
She who has the excellence of home virtues, and can expend within the means of her husband, is a help in the domestic state
Thiruvalluvar
...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.
Simone de Beauvoir
Time, place, and space for all things, but spending [the] majority of one's time playing in outer places, and far less time exploring inner space, is perhaps the worst form of neglect. Don't play yourself; the real you awaits.
T.F. Hodge
Flowers are prettiest where they are watered the most.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.
Albert Camus
All men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer J. Adler
Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers.
Ivan Illich
But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
Albert Camus
Most sexually adventurous women want a man who regards cunnilingus as a basic woman right.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If a man treats you like a princess, he deserves to be your king.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Buddhas also have to be swept away, because the door can become a hindrance if you cling to it.
Osho
A star does not cease to be a star because it is surrounded by darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The hard part about one being tough yet meek is the illusion of being a punching bag.
Criss Jami
The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don't look for meaning in life. It was meant to be lived not understood
Bangambiki Habyarimana
There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!...Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed—thus, ye higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A cast which ye made had failed...The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed. Ye higher men here, have ye not all—been failures?Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh!What wonder even that ye have failed and only half-succeeded, ye half-shattered ones! Doth not—man's future strive and struggle in you?Man's furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?What wonder that many a vessel shattereth! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as ye ought to laugh! Ye higher men, Oh, how much is still possible!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Susan Sontag
Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
William James
The great are like a rubber ball; the harder they hit the ground, the higher they rise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
G.K. Chesterton
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you kiss her cheeks, she is your friend; if you kiss her lips, she is your lover; if you kiss her heart, she is your soul mate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished?
Francis Bacon
Always seek justice, but love only mercy. To love justice and hate mercy is but a doorway to more injustice.
Criss Jami
People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.
John Hasnas
What others think of you doesn't matter as much as what you think of yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Alan W. Watts