Quotes by Philosophers - Page 232

Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Almost any event will put on a new face when received with cheerful acceptance.
Henry S. Haskins
An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.
Edmund Burke
Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some people respect some people only because some people respect them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.
Albert Camus
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Karl Marx
The energy you bring, positive or negative, dictates your perceptions, receptions and radiations.
T.F. Hodge
Lust makes you weak, passion makes you strong, love makes you brave, and heartache makes you wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.
Bertrand Russell
Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.
José Ortega y Gasset
The 'magic' is the known and unknown quiet, spiritual, invisible thread which links and reveals harmonic elements to a universe of high vibrational sensory. And our beloved Bro. Maurice David knew it's undeniable creative power, from within.
T.F. Hodge
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed
Henry David Thoreau
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
Umberto Eco
Let your work speak for itself:If poor, it will remain silent.If average, it will whisper.If good, it will talk.If great, it will shout.If genius, it will sing.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Believing that there is a conflict between rationality and spirituality is like believing that there is a conflict between knowledge and inspiration.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Even if the powers destroy us," he said, "who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent." But I protested, "What theme could justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds." Bvalltu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, "If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.
Olaf Stapledon
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.
Epictetus
Our humanity consists in our ability to sense and respect and respond to the humanity of others.
C. Terry Warner
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When a man is pushed tormented defeated he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits ... he has gained facts learned his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore
If there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
As I have said before, I had no illusions about my performing ability. But I did not know that my despair was brought about not because I had no talent but because I did not know how to develop it.
Shinichi Suzuki
Mix a little time with some space, and suddenly good things fall right into place. No worries, don't doubt it - just build!
T.F. Hodge
When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!
Slavoj Žižek
We're all golden sunflowers inside.
Allen Ginsberg
The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same.
Søren Kierkegaard
I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
Socrates
Brilliance is the masterpiece of your mind. Excellence is the masterpiece of your heart. Genius is the masterpiece of your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
Aristotle
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
Theodor W. Adorno
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
José Ortega y Gasset
Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
Aldous Huxley
If you swim with sharks, make sure you have the appetite of a whale.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Erich Fromm
The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.
Bertrand Russell
A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
Children are defenseless to the ‘virus of dualism’ in whatever form it comes in - which is why [religious ideas] should not be introduced until [children reach] a cognitive age. Religious indoctrination is not required to raise healthy children. Their imagination should be nourished… but not invalidated or shamed. [The result can] be a neurosis, which I believe, is why [people] go to religion and metaphysics when they get older... In the best scenario, children would grow through their imagination into creative adults in an environment that is based on current psychology and a science-based education.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.
Karl Marx
Each time a star twinkles, God is winking at the universe.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
Whether your cup is half-full or half-empty, remind yourself there are others without one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A tree does not stop growing because the wind blew off a few of its leaves.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
Aristotle
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley
In the first instance, it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and "common" instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes -it will be those who form the "mass" in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.
Friedrich A. Hayek
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.
Ayn Rand
And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?
Walter Benjamin
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.
Lao Tzu
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Charity begins at home and usually stays there.
Elbert Hubbard