Quotes by Philosophers - Page 234

If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.
Śāntideva
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
William James
Strength is Life, Weakness is Death.Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death.Love is Life, Hatred is Death.
Swami Vivekananda
Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.
Aldous Huxley
[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.
Peter Sloterdijk
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Syrus
Time is the moving image of eternity.
Plato
Talent is the seed,hard work is the stem,perseverance is the branch,and success is the fruit.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.
Susan Sontag
Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
Abraham J. Heschel
Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly.
Karl Jaspers
Hero-worship exists has existed and will forever exist universally among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
There is no greater heaven than the heart of a loving motherShe takes care of you when you are still in her womb.She nurtures you after you are born.She hurts when you fall,She celebrates when you make your first steps.She is the only person who genuinely cares about you.She loves you as she loves herself.Her heart is your true paradise.I love you mama.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose.
Dagobert D. Runes
The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.
Erich Fromm
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Bertrand Russell
He who would make serious use of his life must always act as though he had a long time to live and schedule his time as though he were about to die.
Emile Littre
I have the soul of a white man, the soul of a black man, the soul of an Asian man; the soul of every man.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fear is the absence of faith.
Paul Tillich
Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.
T.F. Hodge
To learn how to swim, observe fish; how to hunt, observe lions; how to work, observe bees, and how to live, observe sages.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
Blaise Pascal
Your strength lies in knowledge, your power lies in wisdom, your treasure lies in understanding, and your wealth lies in life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.
Criss Jami
No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?
Raoul Vaneigem
That’s what meditation is all about, to be capable of being alone. And remember, aloneness is not loneliness. Loneliness is the state of the person who cannot live alone; loneliness means you are dependent on the crowd, on the other. Aloneness means you are happy with yourself, you are not dependent on anybody. The moment you are not dependent you are an emperor, you are a god, a goddess. Now you have something to share, you can go into the world.
Osho
Some wo/men are so possessive … you end up missing missing them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').
Alexander Nehamas
Ji Wenzi always thought thrice before acting. Hearing this the Master said, "Twice is enough.
Confucius
When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it; for if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?
Epictetus
He who has no faith in others shall find no faith in them.
Lao Tzu
Either you reach a higher point today or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher tomorrow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Who you are in public is a test of your conviction; who you are in private, integrity.
Criss Jami
A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A bird does not achieve its highest potential inside its shell.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.
Edmund Burke
There never were two opinions alike in all the world no more than two hours or two grains: the most universal quality is diversity.
Michel de Montaigne
I contemplated man's little spark, what it should be valued before God alongside of this great work of heaven and earth.
Jakob Böhme
Let your peace be a victory!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Wisdom frees men, even if they are in prison.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year for it is wrong to add fire to fire.
Plato
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions that they exist only in the present which is what there is and all that there is.
Alan Watts
Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.
Martin Heidegger
A slap from an angel will make you wiserthan a kiss from the devil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Faith is a footbridge that you don't know will hold you up over the chasm until you're forced to walk out onto it.
Nicholas Wolterstorff
A bird must rely on its own wings if it is to conquer the sky.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Giorgio Agamben
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Henry David Thoreau
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Iris Murdoch
Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.
Henri Bergson
The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy
Gregory B. Sadler
Men are naturally unequal. They are unequal members of one family, in which one can be brilliant, another mediocre, and another an imbecile. Hereditary substance is a mystery.
Tutea Petre
I would respect feminist who said "Single moms, are you kidding me? Stop taking government benefits because, the government is the patriarchy. So, you are taking things from the patriarchy so you dont have to be responsible. Any woman who takes money from the government using cops who usually extract it from men by force is not a feminist. Is a exceedingly bad bride of the state." I would admire that but, of course feminism doesn't have anything to do with any of that stuff.Look, it's fine. Have your fun. Make fun of men. Go for it. Yea, we're all idiots, we're all selfish, greedy bastards. Ok, it's fine because the government is going to run out of money soon and then all these woman are going to try to find some guy to latch onto when the benefits stop flowing and I mean, you saw this happening with the soviet union. "Now we need you! You guys are great! We missed you so much! Give me some money!"It's just a bunch of noise from a bunch of people who are stealing from the productive.
Stefan Molyneux
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
If he's not a wreck without you, you married the wrong man.
Matshona Dhliwayo