Quotes by Philosophers - Page 213

Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
Umberto Eco
All men are born firstly with the instinct to protect themselves. But few grow to really love themselves, and even fewer learn to love their neighbor as themselves.
Criss Jami
If God had a flower for each moment He thought of you, the whole universe would be a garden.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
Henry David Thoreau
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
Thomas Hobbes
The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.
Patricia Churchland
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you have a dream no one else can see, a reward awaits you that no one else can have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems - overpopulation, boredom, and hunger - since it would do away with all life.
Erich Fromm
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.
Rabindranath Tagore
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
But if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
And where there is ignorance, there is also want of learning and instruction in essentials.
Epictetus
He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion. The man in the worst confusion will end his life without ever getting straightened out; the biggest fool will end his life without ever seeing the light. If three men are traveling along and one is confused, they will still get where they are going - because confusion is in the minority. But if two of them are confused, then they can walk until they are exhausted and never get anywhere - because confusion is in the majority.
Zhuangzi
In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
Albert Camus
Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.
Mortimer J. Adler
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
Paulo Freire
What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.
Jerome A. Miller
Spiritual battles have greater consequences than earthly wars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
Many a woman would not be in a relationship with or married to her man, if he earned half of what he earns; and many a man would not be in a relationship with or married to his woman, if he earned twice as much as he earns.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Cling to the One who clings to nothing;And so clinging, cease to cling.
Thiruvalluvar
Great wildernesses lead you to great Promised Lands.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.
Robert M. Pirsig
The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
Paul Brunton
Consider intentions carefully. Karma gives a damn about ego, awards allegiance to none, and its justice is truly blind.
T.F. Hodge
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
The first step in conforming our intellect to God's truth is to die to our vanity, pride, and craving for respect from colleagues and the public. We must let go of the worldly motivations that drive us, praying to be motivated solely by a genuine desire to submit our minds to God's Word - and then to use that knowledge in service to others.
Nancy Pearcey
Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.[Chapter X - 15,16]
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius
To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.
William Lane Craig
All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.
Criss Jami
Everybody say it's impossible, but I'll try to make it possible
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Any man may make a mistake none but a fool will stick to it. Second thoughts are best as the proverb says.
Cicero
The power of hope! Even a lack of ambition can, for a time, pay off as a necessary facet, as long as hope outweighs it.
Criss Jami
And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?" What is good, PhÊdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Robert M. Pirsig
To encourage people, walk beside them. To inspire people, walk in front of them. To drive people, walk behind them. To lead people, walk with them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Truth was not meant to be told but found
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The struggle alone pleases us not the victory.
Blaise Pascal
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.
Neel Burton
I am not one who was born with great wisdom. I love the ancients and diligently seek wisdom among them.
Confucius
It is only when we forget our learning, do we begin to know.
Henry David Thoreau
The human will to believe is inexhaustible
Thomas Nagel
Regret poisons your thoughts.Doubt poisons your dreams.Fear poisons your hopes.Insincerity poisons your deeds.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
Forgiving means to pardon the unpardonable Faith means believing the unbelievable And hoping means to hope when things are hopeless.
G.K. Chesterton
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Henry David Thoreau
When an idea is too weak to support a simple statement it is a sign that it should be rejected.
Vauvenargues
It is no easy thing for a principle to become a man's own unless each day he maintains it and works it out in his life.
Epictetus
All terrible things are more terrible if they give us no chance of retrieving a blunder—either no chance at all, or only one that depends on our enemies and not ourselves. Those things are also worse which we cannot, or cannot easily, help. Speaking generally, anything causes us to feel fear that when it happens to, or threatens, others causes us to feel pity.
Aristotle
A social critic is someone whose work revolves around where and how our successes are failing us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Philip, and give it to Ken Daggart? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused nothing but contempt?
Ayn Rand
The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.
Alan W. Watts
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.
Cornel West
The idea that all souls are mortal is the only notion surely terminating love and all its forms.
Criss Jami