Quotes by Philosophers - Page 224

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
‎"...θα πρέπει να αντιληφθείς, αγαπητή Τερέζα, ότι τα αντικείμενα δεν έχουν, κατά την άποψη μας, άλλη αξία από εκείνη που τους δίνει η φαντασία μας
Marquis de Sade
Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.
Criss Jami
Books are absent teachers.
Mortimer J. Adler
Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty.
Marcus Aurelius
I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say
Albert Camus
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
G.K. Chesterton
It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…
William James
Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To a homeless man, home is literally where the heart is.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just because everyone is behaving like a clown, it doesn’t mean you have to join the circus.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Have the mind of a swam, the heart of a lion, the tongue of a serpent, the flair of a swam, and the soul of a dove.
Matshona Dhliwayo
How unhappy is he who cannot forgive himself.
Publilius Syrus
Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way
Bertrand Russell
In the fashion industry, everything goes retro except the prices.
Criss Jami
The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.
Henry David Thoreau
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Play with reason and doubt will close all the gates
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
Francis Bacon
It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.
Alain de Botton
Most employees don’t really want to be highly-paid; they just want to earn more than their peers, and, more importantly, more than their neighbours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.
George Santayana
Lust promises you the world, and disappoints. Love promises you the universe, and delivers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Even more, in the created thing, is a perfection that she exists; since the greatest of all imperfections is, not to exist.
Baruch Spinoza
We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
Herbert Spencer
We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.
Diogenes
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
Sam Harris
The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used.
Mortimer J. Adler
Don’t mourn over the past; it has no pity for you. Don’t cry over the present; it has no sympathy for you; and don’t weep over the future, it has no mercy on you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood.
G.K. Chesterton
If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.
Maimonides
The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself in spite of being unacceptable.
Paul Tillich
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Umberto Eco
Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.
Erich Fromm
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
René Descartes
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.
G.I. Gurdjieff
["F]or it's not possible," [Socrates] said, "for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound and trustworthy, and then a little later discovering that this person is wicked and untrustworthy - and then having this experience again with another. And whenever somebody experiences this many times, and especially at the hands of just those he might regard as his most intimate friends and comrades, he then ends up taking offense all the time and hates all human beings and believes there's nothing at all sound in anybody.
Plato
Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.
Guy Debord
Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them.
Marcus Aurelius
The opinion of success matters more than the opinions of your critics.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause
David Hume
A tree fears an axe even though its handle is made from it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Fear is an assassin; if you let it in your life, it will kill your dreams.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If a ship is strong, the ocean's tides do not trouble it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Sam Harris
If I simply do my best, I cannot complain even if I am taken to hell.
Shinichi Suzuki
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.
G.K. Chesterton
To do two things at once is to do neither.
Publilius Syrus
Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed or exempt from danger.
Niccolò Machiavelli
You don't scale a mountain with your mouth, but with your feet.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
G.K. Chesterton
I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-lifedestroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politicsof despair. This world deserves better.
Alexis Shotwell
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent.
Jean de La Bruyère
What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
Rebecca Goldstein
*You only get one chance to make a first impression.* Ah, whatever!!! Who said you get three chances to make the second impression?!!
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The formation of society serves not only for defensive purposes, but is also very useful, and, indeed, absolutely necessary, as rendering possible the division of labor. If men did not render mutual assistance to each other, no one would have either the skill or the time to provide for his own sustenance and preservation: for all men are not equally apt for all work, and no one would be capable of preparing all that he individually stood in need of. Strength and time, I repeat, would fail, if every one had in person to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind corn, to cook, to weave, to stitch and perform the other numerous functions required to keep life going; to say nothing of the arts and sciences which are also entirely necessary to the perfection and blessedness of human nature.
Baruch Spinoza