Quotes by Philosophers - Page 215

All true love and all sacrifice arein their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism andits separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary firstfragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity betweencreatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that fromwhich we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for inthe darkness.
Sri Aurobindo
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Thought is born of failure.
Lancelot Law Whyte
Politicians are a breed of the human race who believe they know everything
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.
Mircea Eliade
When something looks impossible, don’t give up without testing its impossibility
Bangambiki Habyarimana
God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.
Criss Jami
No-thinking is the door. No-word is the gate. No-mind is the way.
Osho
Be true to thine own self
Socrates
There is no such thing as passive receiving of Tradition. He who receives, the disciple, is always — must always be — the scene of a creation. To receive is to create, to innovate! 'The petrification of acquired knowledge — the freezing of spiritual things — allowing itself to be placed like an inert content in the mind and to be handed on, frozen, from one generation to another, is not real transmission….' Handing on is 'resumption, life, invention and renewal, a mode without which revealed thinking, that is to say, thinking which is authentically thought, is not possible.
Marc-Alain Ouaknin
We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.
Will Durant
One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.
Stanisław Lem
After a certain point, all natural bodily changes are for the worst.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.
Judith Butler
Can you look at a flower without thinking?
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!
Friedrich Nietzsche
he who will not economize will have to agonize
Confucius
A drop of sense can save you an ocean of tears.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it.
Collin Wilson
Your greatest actions are those that meet another’s greatest need.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Tough love may be tough to give, but it is a necessity of life and assurance of positive growth.
T.F. Hodge
...were these Essays of mine considerable enough to deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fallout that they would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in the middle region.
Michel de Montaigne
Before marriage a man prays that she accepts, after marriage a woman prays that he accepts
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.
Criss Jami
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.
Socrates
Many a man's strength is in opposition and when he faileth he groweth out of use.
Francis Bacon
Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party.
Bertrand Russell
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Blaise Pascal
The heart you kiss today, the lips you kiss tomorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is very sad to see children live like orphans whilst their parents are still alive. After all, children need the constant love of parents.
Gift Gugu Mona
Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.
Peter Kreeft
Good deeds are the highest notes in life's symphony.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The dawn of beauty always comes after night.
Sorin Cerin
In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the differential character of change: some things change relative to other things. However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the ways in which they change. That is what time is: the transformation of transformation.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Henry David Thoreau
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley
The heart smiles when the soul shines.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean.
Jonathan Edwards
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
Henry David Thoreau
A truly free man is not free 'from' anything, nor free 'to' anything, he is just free. Free within himself.
Ilyas Kassam
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Albert Camus
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
Simone de Beauvoir
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.
Henry David Thoreau
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We sometimes take photos (or record a video) so that we can later see what was happening while we were busy taking photos (or recording a video).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who acts, spoils; he who grasps, lets slip.
Lao Tzu
No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself
Plato
Don’t go outside your house to see the flowers.My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.Inside your body there are flowers.One flower has a thousand petals.That will do for a place to sit.Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beautyinside the body and out of it,before gardens and after gardens.
Kabir
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.
Eric Hoffer
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Delos McKown
We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses.
Criss Jami
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
Ayn Rand
All wealth is the product of labor
John Locke