Quotes by Philosophers - Page 210

It is in the storm, not the calm, that a rainbow is born.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.
Antony Flew
Think of how you feel when you are sick, or how you felt when you were learning to ride your bike. The physical state of your body has a direct effect on how you think about the world, on the state of your mind. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that your body has a direct effect on who you are
Gregory Bassham
Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
Jonathan Glover
In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
William Kingdon Clifford
All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect.
Arthur Schopenhauer
So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
The true religion is to be posited not in the knowledge or confession of what God allegedly does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of this.
Immanuel Kant
Every word is a prejudice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
Our entire life worth's less than one moment of the absolute's truth vanity.
Sorin Cerin
In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy’.
Frédéric Gros
If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.
Criss Jami
Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.
Austin Dacey
One who has great wisdom has great power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.
Jean Baudrillard
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity but in being uninteresting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?
Alan W. Watts
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
Ayn Rand
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
Baron de Montesquieu
Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or opinion.
Auberon Herbert
Death actually never kills you, time does
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage.
Meister Eckhart
If you think you can't, you're wrong and right
Bangambiki Habyarimana
To put an arrogant 'famous' singer in her place: pretend to be deaf.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One who conquers fear conquers his greatest enemy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst
Friedrich Nietzsche
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
Jean de La Bruyère
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.
G.K. Chesterton
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies the hardest victory is the victory over self.
Aristotle
...we ought also to consider as false all that is doubtful.
René Descartes
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
Bertrand Russell
By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.
John Mark Reynolds
The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
In certain situations, manifesting anger is the right attitude; in others it is not the right thing to manifest because it will only add to the violence. In the first case, anger unblocks the conflict and causes another to become more conscious. In the latter, it only adds to the unconsciousness and inflames the conflict. (73)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'.
Slavoj Žižek
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.
William H. Gass
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
Peter Kreeft
as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.
Slavoj Žižek
Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.
Gaston Bachelard
The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.
Jacques Derrida
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
Elbert Hubbard
Do not trust a teacher that is unwilling to learn.
T.F. Hodge
Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.
Socrates
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
You cannot write if you are not angry
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The idea that the Big Bang theory allows us to infer that the universe began to exist about 15 billion years ago has attracted the attention of many theists. This theory seemed to confirm or at least lend support to the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Indeed, the suggestion of a divine creation seemed so compelling that the notion that "God created the Big Bang" has taken a hold on popular consciousness and become a staple in the theistic component of ‘educated common sense’. By contrast, the response of atheists and agnostics to this development has been comparatively lame.
Quentin Smith
We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. (...)If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
Emil M. Cioran
So if you are confused, please remember – don’t help anybody, because your help is going to be poisonous. If you are confused don’t be occupied with others, because you are simply creating trouble, your disease will become infectious. Don’t give advice to anyone, and if you have a little clarity of thought, don’t take advice from someone who is confused. Remain alert, because confused people always like to give advice. And they give it free of charge, they give it very generously!
Osho
Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.
Seneca
April Fools' is the only day to take people seriously.
Criss Jami