Quotes by Philosophers - Page 218

The high cost of greatness is better than the low cost of mediocrity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Good breeding a union of kindness and independence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be merry, because it confuses your enemies; happy, because it annoys them; cheerful, because it angers them; and joyful, because it kills them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
Emil M. Cioran
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Eugen Herrigel
At some level, it is even tempting to think that since strict materialism is among the most incoherent of superstitions - one that has never really asked the question of the being of things in any depth or with any persistence, or one that has at best attempted to conjure that question away as a fallacy of grammar - it is incapable of imagining any conception of God more sophisticated than its own. The materialist encounters an instance of unjust suffering and, by a sort of magical thinking, concludes from the absence of any immediately visible moral order that there must be nothing transcendent of material causality, in much the same way that certain of our more remote, primitive ancestors might have seen a flash of lightning in the sky and concluded that some god must have flung it from on high. In neither case does the conclusion follow from the evidence (though in the latter case the reasoning is somewhat more rigorous); and in neither case is the god at issue much more than an affective myth.
David Bentley Hart
Promote the voluntary family; voluntarism is the only known cure for abuses of power - in politics, the economy or the family.
Stefan Molyneux
In order to mount to heaven, you used the Inferno to give you momentum. "The further down you gain your momentum," you often used to tell me, "the higher you shall be able to reach. The militant Christian's greatest worth is not his virtue, but his struggle to transform into virtue the impudence, dishonor, unfaithfulness, and malice within him. One day Lucifer will be the most glorious archangel standing next to God; not Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael—but Lucifer, after he has finally transubstantiated his terrible darkness into light.
Nikos Kazantzakis
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
Albert Camus
The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.
Albert Camus
Sanity for anyone is pretty much out of the question, as both the saint and the sinner appear only equally insane: the saint appears it for actually believing in a place of eternal torment; the sinner, for deciding to risk going to that place of eternal torment.
Criss Jami
If you can dispense with reputation, then you are free from care. Reputation is only a visitor, but reality is here to stay.
Liezi
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.
Kedar Joshi
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
Canada has no cultural unity no linguistic unity no religious unity no economic unity no geographic unity. All it has is unity.
Kenneth Boulding
Forgiveness is all about love. Where love abounds, there forgiveness will not tarry
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In the body is tremendous strength, in the mind is brilliant potential, in the heart is extraordinary influence, and in the soul is remarkable power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
Sam Harris
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
How then find the courage for action?... By accepting the human condition more simply and candidly by dreading troubles less calculating less hoping more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
Iris Murdoch
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.
Plato
Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
Sam Harris
Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness".
Erich Fromm
to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
Søren Kierkegaard
All philosophy lies in two words sustain and abstain.
Epictetus
Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.
Vauvenargues
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
G.K. Chesterton
Pebbles that bring you joy are better than diamonds that bring you sorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As plants do not grow in the dark, never allow yourself to be in someone’s shadow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The Spirit, and your soul are not the same things. The Spirit is God - the source. Your soul is God's imagination.
T.F. Hodge
If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion most people would be content to take their own and depart.
Socrates
Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...
Raymond Tallis
If you haven't been happy very young you can still be happy later on but it's much harder. You need more luck.
Simone de Beauvoir
To dream doesn't cost you much, so dream.To hope doesn't cost you much, so hope.To yearn doesn't cost you much, so yearn;but to succeed costs you everything, so persevere.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Speech is silvern silence is golden.
Thomas Carlyle
Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
Albert Camus
Wherever there is a human being there is an opportunity for a kindness.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The only thing that is sure about the future is that it will happen. The only thing not sure about the future is what will happen".
Ronald Green
Divines are generally agreed that sin radically and fundamentally consists in what is negative, or privative, having its root and foundation in a privation or want of holiness. And therefore undoubtedly, if it be so that sin does very much consist in hardness of heart, and so in the want of pious affections of heart, holiness does consist very much in those pious affections.
Jonathan Edwards
No matter how much territory the wolf conquers the lion will still rule the jungle.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
Albert Camus
Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential.
Antonio Gramsci
Spiritual highs help you overcome emotional lows.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don't have to be a big name to do big things. Shine does not require recognition.
T.F. Hodge
Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.
Robert M. Pirsig
There are no keys to success - only tools.
Criss Jami
Knowledge is the food of the soul.
Plato
The first draught serveth for health the second for pleasure the third for shame and the fourth for madness.
Anacharsis
There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
Iris Murdoch
No one tries to stone a tree whose fruit is not ripe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.
Harry G. Frankfurt
Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.
Voltaire