Quotes by Philosophers - Page 235

CHAPTER VIConcerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And AbilityLET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.
Ludwig Feuerbach
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
William of Conches
The most beautiful rainbow is the one inside your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We don't need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.
Donald Horban
. . . when you are stressed, if you take three deep breaths before you say or do anything, this will help prevent you from making choices you might regret later.
Ilchi Lee
The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked.
Thomas More
It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free - where, in fact, the vast majority were not free. It is no less strange that they never stopped to ask whether perhaps the characters which they so much admired were not made possible by the existence of a class which was not free. Rousseau, in whose philosophy were many things, was fully conscious of this difficulty: "Must we say that liberty is possible only on a basis of slavery? Perhaps we must.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Democracy is in conflict with individual freedom.
Bruno Leoni
We always see other's wealth & lifestyle. But should not neglect their hard work as well...
Gargi
Adversity is the evil twin of reward.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him." - Gaston Bachelard, "Reveries on Reverie (Anima - Animus)", The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Page 88
Gaston Bachelard
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
Much like humans, opinions come in all shapes and forms, but in the end, they are just what they are; and may yet still be categorized in nature. The first you might say is the Indoctrinal, which is, of course, dictated by community and necessity, by the human need for acceptance; secondly, there is the Personal, and this is often dictated by individuality, by the yearning to seem interesting and intelligent, or free, or special; and lastly comes the Emotional. This is most commonly dictated by circumstance and bitterness and excitement. However, rarely do we find the case in which any of these are dictated by reason in the pure state: it is by this we see that at the core of a number of false opinions lies not always misinformation but quite often some issue of the human self.
Criss Jami
The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
Susan Sontag
philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Talk less. Do more. Fear less. Achieve more.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If man was a logical creature: his last suspect—namely, his mouth—was going to be the first; whenever he thinks that someone, or, something is smelly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who makes fun of a short and fat man’s weight is much less cruel than he who makes fun of his height.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry David Thoreau
Prosperity makes few friends.
Vauvenargues
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
Paul Tillich
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
Henry David Thoreau
To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project.
Cornel West
Once you have heard the Indian Bamboo flute then everything else is just ordinary!
Osho
...but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw form it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it)...
John Locke
Nothing is as irritating to a shy man as a confident girl.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.
Friedrich A. Hayek
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
Iris Murdoch
Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
G.K. Chesterton
If growing up means not seeing one’s family and friends on the regular—all in the name of paying the bills, then growing up is overrated.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Failure to find the truth is perhaps an intellectual defeat, but failure to look for the truth is an intellectual surrender.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Who will deny that true religion consists, in a great measure, in vigorous and lively actings of the inclination and will of the soul, or the fervent exercises of the heart? That religion which God requires, and will accept, does not consist in weak, dull, and lifeless, wishes, raising us but a little above a state of indifference.
Jonathan Edwards
Even the devils are theists. I am of all people one of the least qualified to judge, but I do believe that some atheists are closer to God than are some theists. With Him, it is better to be distant in the mind but near in the heart than it is to be distant in the heart but near in the mind.
Criss Jami
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.
Olaf Stapledon
Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.
Osman Bakar
The joy about our work is spoiled when we perform it not because of what we produce but because of the pleasure with which it can provide us or the pain against which it can protect us.
Paul Tillich
The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.
Will Durant
...[R]eal wisdom is the property of God, and... human wisdom has little or no value.
Socrates
Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.
Norbert Wiener
The size of your storm determines the size of your rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Luck is blind, they say. It can’t see where it’s going and keeps running into people…and the people it knocks into we call lucky! Well, to hell with luck if it's like that, I say!
Nikos Kazantzakis
Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn't make me do — you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It's so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You'll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling — as she wanted him to remain.
Ayn Rand
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We should get into the way of appearing lively in religion, more by being lively in the service of God and our generation than by the liveliness and forwardness of our tongues, and making a business of proclaiming on the house tops with our mouths the holy and eminent acts and exercises of our own hearts. Christians that are intimate friends would talk together of their experiences and comforts in a manner better becoming Christian humility and modesty, and more to each other's profit: their tongues not running before, but rather going behind their hands and feet, after the prudent example of the blessed apostle, 2 Cor. xii. 6. Many occasions of spiritual pride would thus be cut off, and so a great door shut against the devil. A great many of the main stumbling-blocks against experimental and powerful religion would be removed, and religion would be declared and manifested in such a way that, instead of hardening spectators, and exceedingly promoting infidelity and atheism, it would, above all things, tend to convince men that there is a reality in religion, and greatly awaken them, and win them, by convincing their consciences of the importance and excellency of religion. Thus the light of professors would so shine before men, that others, seeing their good works, would glorify their Father which is in heaven.
Jonathan Edwards
It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
Friedrich A. Hayek
You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.
Albert Camus
It is highly probable that we choose our posture, not our problems.
T.F. Hodge
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh what times! Oh what standards!
Cicero
What does reason demand of a man? A very easy thing-to live in accord with his own nature.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Folly plots a fool's death from the moment they become friends. Wisdom bestows blessings upon a wise man from the moment they wed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Create hell and people will be impatient to get there, just out of curiosity
Bangambiki Habyarimana
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Jacques Derrida
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James