Quotes by Philosophers - Page 233

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.
Albert Camus
He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason
Baruch Spinoza
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.
Marcus Aurelius
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes
Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
William James
Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.
Aldous Huxley
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.
G.I. Gurdjieff
I don't look girls in the eyes, I am afraid to fall in love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Daniel C. Dennett
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the ‘next thing’ is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed.
Bertrand Russell
O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
Desire and hope will push us on toward the future.
Michel de Montaigne
Today’s amateurs are tomorrow’s champions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is only safe to mock a crocodile when you have crossed the river.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Peanut butter is a poor man’s marmalade.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
Charles Sanders Peirce
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
John Dewey
the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.
John Stuart Mill
I believe the key to solving everything from individual problems to the global environmental crisis or political and religious conflicts is to be found in restoring this link with the great life force. By recovering our natural healing ability and the goodness of human nature, we can create a truly peaceful, sustainable world. And I don’t believe that these are things that social institutions or prestigious experts can do for us: they must happen within each and every one of us.
Ilchi Lee
We can’t all be comedians, some people have to do the laughing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.
David Hawkins
When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?
David Hume
The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.
Charles Eisenstein
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
Allen Ginsberg
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher education. The government is a kind of market-oriented government and they came out with an official paper, a ‘White Paper’ saying that it is not the responsibility of the state to support any institution that can’t survive in the market. So, if Oxford is teaching philosophy, the arts, Greek history, medieval history, and so on, and they can’t sell it on the market, why should they be supported? Because life consists only of what you can sell in the market and get back, nothing else. That is a real pathology.
Noam Chomsky
You have the world at your feet if you have wisdom in your mind.You have the world in your hands if you have joy in your heart.You have the world in your bosom if you have love in your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.
Henry David Thoreau
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain de Botton
Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.
Peter Sloterdijk
The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Henry David Thoreau
Don't ruin a good opportunity fixating on a bad one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Emil M. Cioran
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Albert Camus
A lion is born knowing how to hunt, but has to learn how to hunt well.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One secret to wisdom:think more, speak less.If you let your words be few,your troubles will not be many.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.
Jean de La Bruyère
When you look into the mirror, you can’t even see your heart; but when God looks at your shadow, He sees your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Will Durant
The family is one of the greatest traps that society has used for millennia to keep man a slave
Osho
Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside
Thomas Nagel
I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.
John Ruskin
When you lose a friend or a lover, those who remain in your life gain (more of your attention).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Who prays at help in the Illusion of his Life does not understand that his only aid is death
Sorin Cerin
Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An egg's true value is only known when it is broken.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?
Neel Burton
...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...
Plato
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.
Paul Tillich
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.
Walter Kaufmann
Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.
Paul Brunton
Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.
Henry David Thoreau
You don’t need armor if your skin is thick.You don’t need a sword if your mind is sharp.You don’t need a shield if your heart is strong.You don’t need a fortress is your soul is secure.
Matshona Dhliwayo