Quotes by Philosophers - Page 212

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
Tzvetan Todorov
When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is easier to fall off of a ladder than to climb one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We need a reason to speak but none to keep silent.
Pierre Nicole
To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
Bodhidharma
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.
Henry David Thoreau
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.
Alfred North Whitehead
Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.
John Dewey
They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life; that would delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.
G.K. Chesterton
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Umberto Eco
Adversity is a severe instructor. ... He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.
Alain de Botton
The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
Aldous Huxley
She knew of a woman who had entered such a bargain at a large automobile manufacturer in 1973 and successfully managed to keep her accounting position for over four decades.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
G.K. Chesterton
Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.
Carl Cohen
The great and glorious masterpiece of man is how to live with a purpose.
Michel de Montaigne
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
Truth is my weapon. Knowledge is my armor. Wisdom is my strategist. Love is my warrior.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Bless the world with your positive thoughts,with your positive desires, with your positive words, and with your positive actions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The word of God is more powerful when put into action than when only spoken.
Gift Gugu Mona
I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job." -Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.
Albert Camus
Look for the person everyone hates, and love them.
Criss Jami
The eye of judgment sees at a distance what it refuses to see in it's own reflection.
T.F. Hodge
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring they carry them as silently away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....
Noam Chomsky
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Jacques Ellul
Fate smiles to the bold
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of “evermore” another act of violence.
Nel Noddings
P40- this violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.
Paulo Freire
I'm never proud of my old work. I always feel as though my skills have since improved.
Criss Jami
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Sam Harris
All things fade and quickly turn to myth.
Marcus Aurelius
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Emil M. Cioran
Acceptance makes any event put on a new face.
Henry S. Haskins
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
Marquis de Sade
One who wishes to cross the ocean first builds a ship.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Mastery, to whatever degree your circumstance allows, is determined by a handful of choices repeated daily.
Chris Matakas
Please, dear God of happiness, show the radiance of your spectrum to our world, which here means to forget everything.
Sorin Cerin
If you don't want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.
Bruce Lee
Visionaries will always meet opposition from weak minds but the seeds they plant always save the world
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Behind your greatest fears lie your greatest rewards.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To create is to live twice.
Albert Camus
Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense
Baltasar Gracián
There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.
Albert Camus
The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self...from within.
T.F. Hodge
If you want to know how the heart is related to the soul, love someone.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
...I do not believe that the law of God permits a better man to be harmed by a worse. No doubt my accuser might put me to death or have me banished or deprived of civic rights; but even if he thinks, as he probably does (and others to, I dare say), that these are great calamities, I do not think so... For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable. This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree, and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. But I do know that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether God or man, is wicked and dishonourable; and so I shall never feel more fear or aversion for something which, for all I know, may really be a blessing, than for those evils which I know to be evils.
Socrates
Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.
Augustine of Hippo
O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.
Henry David Thoreau
You do not have to wait until you become a saint. [Prayer] is the way to become a saint.
Peter Kreeft
Time flows away like the water in the river.
Confucius
I sit and ponder my existence: how I'm here, what put me here in these thoughts, these feelings, birthed from a timeless sleep, what it felt like, or rather the lack thereof, to not have been and now to 'be', and suddenly, I realize how absurd I am to exist, the fragility in my understanding of existence; I then wonder why the supernatural, the thought of other beings, of God or of gods, must be distinctly absurd - by which I am no longer sure. 'If I exist and I have made myself absurd to me, then why not they exist while merely believed absurd by me?' Perhaps it is true that in a wandering head, one full of wonders, the natural becomes supernatural and the supernatural becomes preternatural (or rational within the sights of discovery and explanation), just as the return home after a life-long journey feels, for a moment, foreign after the many experiences.
Criss Jami
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Life and art are nothing but associations of ideas and sorrows that nourish our illusory quest for the Holy Grail of human existence. It’s a mystery!
Carl William Brown
Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to reenter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.
Albert Camus