Quotes by Philosophers - Page 231

Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
If you were able to fall a hundred times as a child and rise, you are able to fall a thousand times as a grown up and soar.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.
Jesus Zamora Bonilla
Meaning comes from the unknown, from the stranger, from the unpredictable that suddenly knocks at your door — a flower that suddenly blooms and you never expected it; a friend that suddenly happens to be on the street you were not waiting for; a love that blooms suddenly and you were not even aware that this was going to happen, you had not even imagined, not even dreamed. Then life has meaning. Then life has a dance. Then every step is happy because it is not a step filled with duty, it is a step moving into the unknown. The river is going towards the sea.
Osho
I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the System, if only I can manage to set eyes on it. Hitherto I have had no success; and though I have young legs, I am almost weary from running back and forth... Once or twice I have been on the verge of bending the knee. But at the last moment, when I already had my handkerchief spread on the ground, to avoid soiling my trousers, and I made a trusting appeal to one of the initiated who stood by: "Tell me now sincerely, is it entirely finished; for if so I will kneel down before it, even at the risk of ruining a pair of trousers (for on account of the heavy traffic to and from the system, the road has become quite muddy)," - I always receive the same answer: "No, it is not yet quite finished." And so there was another postponement - of the system, and of my homage. System and finality are pretty much one and the same, so much so that if the system is not finished, there is no system.
Søren Kierkegaard
God's greatest gift to manIn all the bounty He was moved to makeThroughout creation-the one gift the mostClose to his goodness and the one He callsMost precious-is free will.
Dante Alighieri
The death of dogma is the birth of reality.
Immanuel Kant
The saddest day in the woods is when birds run out of happy songs to sing.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you're a boss, and not a leader, your time is limited.
T.F. Hodge
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much. It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
Simone Weil
The essential quality of living life lies simply in the living.
Bruce Lee
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you. The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the one who has made it all.
Kabir
But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
Immanuel Kant
As for me all I know is that I know nothing.
Socrates
Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the last drink delights the toper, the glass which souses him and puts the finishing touch on his drunkenness. Each pleasure reserves to the end the greatest delights which it contains. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.
Seneca
Like alcohol and poverty, a heartbreak has the power to make a man do something he wouldn’t normally do and to make a woman do someone she wouldn’t normally do.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
this terror then and drakness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature; the warp whose design we shall begin with this first principle, nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
Cicero
The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.
Arthur Schopenhauer
...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.
Alfred Korzybski
A genius is a grown-up that did not grow up.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them
Otto Weininger
Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.t
Thomas Paine
A high self-esteem having artist works hard to be understood. A low self-esteem having artist works hard to be agreed with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.
Eric Hoffer
Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
Iris Murdoch
Custom is a shroud that conceals everything. Not without first encountering the uncustomary will we be able to recognize what is customary and, more importantly, to change it. Such is the impulse behind our conversation with the vampryoteuthis
Vilém Flusser
It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never intentionally given pain even to another.
Marcus Aurelius
It is a harsh reality that some of the most important and respectable jobs which deserve high salaries might be better off with low salaries. A politician, or a minister, or a teacher is sure to be working sincerely and selflessly for the good of the people when through and through there is little monetary reward guaranteed. This is how the charlatans are weeded out of the field.
Criss Jami
Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me...
Ayn Rand
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best—that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?
Ayn Rand
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.
Albert Camus
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
Ayn Rand
Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
Albert Camus
Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.
Jonathan Edwards
If you have assumed any character beyond your strength, you have both demeaned yourself ill in that and quitted one which you might have supported.
Epictetus
In their minds, it seems as though people don't often have the same answers, but in their hearts, they do very frequently have the same questions.
Criss Jami
The expression of preferences is the essence of love.
Stefan Molyneux
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
One is not born a woman - one becomes one.
Simone de Beauvoir
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
G.K. Chesterton
The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism
Jean-Paul Sartre
The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverse is, one has an ideological production). The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author…
Michel Foucault
Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.
Novalis
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Those who have wisdom have all:Fools with all have nothing.
Thiruvalluvar
A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.
Stefan Molyneux
What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
Emil M. Cioran
The first forty years of life give us the text the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Schopenhauer
Even if someone does something that brings bad to you,do something good for them and make them feel shy for what they have done to you
Thiruvalluvar
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-conquest is the greatest of victories.
Plato
Man lives by habits indeed but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
William James