Quotes by Philosophers - Page 219

As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical.
Henry David Thoreau
Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
Carl William Brown
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
Socrates
No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
Henry David Thoreau
Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.
Zhuangzi
One day I asked God to move the mountain ahead of me, but he said no because he wanted me to experience the joy of being on a mountain top.
Gift Gugu Mona
It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
Umberto Eco
Ingredients to success: know what you do well, know what to do well, and know someone who's swell.
Criss Jami
Do not underrate yourself trying to be somebody else.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For a practitioner of love and compassion, an enemy is one of the most important teachers. Without an enemy you cannot practice tolerance, and without tolerance you cannon build a sound basis of compassion. So in order to practice compassion, you should have an enemy.When you face your enemy who is going to hurt you, that is the real time to practice tolerance. Therefore, an enemy is the cause of the practice of tolerance; tolerance is the effect or result of an enemy. So those are cause and effect. As is said, "Once something has the relationship of arising from that thing, one cannot consider that thing from which it arises as a harmer; rather it assists the production of the effect.
Śāntideva
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.
John Stuart Mill
To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as “sub-conciousness” or “supra-consciousness” is not correct. The word “beyond” is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no “beyond”, no “underneath”, no “upon” in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.
D.T. Suzuki
Love is black. Love is white. Love is brown. Love is humanity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.
Simone de Beauvoir
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible…Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal…
William James
Reigning doctrines are often called a "double standard".The term is misleading.It is more accurate to describe them as a single standard,clear and unmistakable,the standard that Adam Smith called the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: ...All for ourselves,and nothing for other people." Much has changed since his day,but the vile maxim flourishes.
Noam Chomsky
One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone”. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Excessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy the social, cultural, and environmental conditions for equal productive freedom.
Ivan Illich
Love's whispers drown out sorrow's echoes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am acutely aware that all I have been able to achieve has been in large part due to circumstances outside my control. This is why I teach, and this is why I write. I want to be one of those opportunities for others. Perhaps this is the true measure of success.
Chris Matakas
Nothing can be gained by extensive study and wide reading. Give them up immediately.
Dōgen
What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who’re solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning ‘square’ rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it’s capable of coming up with a solution.
Robert M. Pirsig
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G.K. Chesterton
The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.
Jacques Rancière
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
When individuals and communities do not govern self, they risk being ruled by external forces that care less about the well-being of the village.
T.F. Hodge
Powerful leaders use their position of power to empower others.
Gift Gugu Mona
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
I understand by 'freedom of spirit' something quite definite - the unconditional will to say No where it is dangerous to say No.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Think like the great,speak like the great,act like the great,and you will become like the great.
Matshona Dhliwayo
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet
Plato
When we ... devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty ihen happiness comes of itself.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
A candle is at its brightest in the dark.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him."We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small."When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great."Now, the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief.
G.K. Chesterton
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
G.K. Chesterton
Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting.
A.C. Grayling
Some of today’s slaves sleep on king size beds.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scientists are in the strange position of being confronted daily by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no way of explaining it.
Christian de Quincey
Disappointments should be cremated not embalmed.
Henry S. Haskins
Some lean back. But those who lean forward are poised to cross the finish-line, first!
T.F. Hodge
It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
Aristotle
He who defends with love will be secure; Heaven will save him, and protect him with love.
Lao Tzu
...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.
Theodor Adorno
It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
Sam Harris
The Blessing #1:May your eyes be profitable,may your ears be dutiful,may your tongue be insightful,may your hands be successful.May your mind be fruitful,may your heart be blissful,may your soul be joyful,may your life be peaceful.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Height is not might.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.
Erich Fromm
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
Seneca
Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
Bertrand Russell
It is very similar to late Weimar Germany, The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over. [Chomsky in a 2010 interview with Chris Hedges on the crisis of democracy in the United States]
Chomsky Noam
Your talent is a seed; cultivate it, and in no time, you will harvest success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish.
Confucius
If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science.
GADAMER
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Socrates