Quotes by Philosophers - Page 238

If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself.
Osho
Condition a woman (or a man) to value submission above all other attitudes and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be sadness.
Sam Keen
If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.
Jean de La Bruyère
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, But only thinks and does; Though surely out 'twill leak Without the help of Greek, Or any tongue.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.
Vladimir Odoyevsky
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.
Aldous Huxley
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Injustice in the end produces independence.
Voltaire
Promoting what you don't like, invites more of it to your doorstep. Beat the right drum. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
There is no cure for ambition other than success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nor it is an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet we can take pleasure in it.
Rudolph Steiner
In relation to Monotheism considered as such, Judaism stabilized but “confiscated” the Message; Christianity universalized but “altered” it; Islam in turn restored it by stabilizing and universalizing it.
Frithjof Schuon
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
Titus Lucretius Carus
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The darkest storms color the brightest rainbows.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There’s nothing lonelier than empty relationships. At least when you’re alone you can be yourself, but when you’re in empty relationships you can’t even be yourself.You can be real alone, or you can be a ghost with false friends.Pulse proximity is not intimacy, and it’s worse than no friends at all.
Stefan Molyneux
Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.
Jonathan Glover
A prudent man will think more important what fate has conceded to him than what it has denied.
Baltasar Gracián
What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.
Robert M. Pirsig
Losses are comparative imagination only makes them of any moment.
Blaise Pascal
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
Peter Kreeft
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
John Dewey
It is not God that is worshipped but the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
If you have money, you are affluent; if you have joy, you are wealthy; and if you have love, you are rich.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Until Einstein (roughly), THE universe of Newton was, for us, THE universe. With Einstein, it became A universe. Something similar happen to man. A new 'man' was produced, just as good, certainly contraditory to the old one. THE man became A man, otherwise a 'conceptual construction', one among the infinity of possible ones.
Alfred Korzybski
When thou goest to woman take thy whip.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
Thomas Paine
Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Education is the manifestation of perfection already existing in man.
Swami Vivekananda
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau
The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily..
Erich Fromm
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man is called a saint not because he does no longer sin but because he recognizes his weakness and seeks for forgiveness every time he falls
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
Ayn Rand
Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies.
Aristotle
Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.
Jonathan Glover
I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.
Alexander Nehamas
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.
Jean-François Lyotard
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
Peter Kreeft
It is not a lack of love but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The only good is knowledge and the only evil ignorance.
Diogenes
P15 - Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".
Paulo Freire
The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill
First organizing it on paper isn't just academic, it's an applied prerequisite for manifestation.
T.F. Hodge
Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.
Ivan Illich
There are three classes of men-lovers of wisdom lovers of honour lovers of gain.
Plato
They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.
John Stuart Mill
There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
Aldous Huxley
Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.
Alfred North Whitehead
No tree becomes large without smaller trees hoping its branches get cut off.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Less fear, more courage.Less doubt, more faith.Less talking, more action.Less ignorance, more knowledge.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Civic duty? Perhaps it would be a little naive to try to coerce me into voting. I assure you my basic standards of healthy living are very different from yours, which is the reason I do not vote. You should note that, as nonsensical a scenario, if forced to choose I would most definitely rather live in a failing, Christ-honoring, God-fearing nation than a flourishing one that mocks said Creator. Beware of my personal ambitions.
Criss Jami
There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
Ayn Rand
I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.
Bertrand Russell
A diploma is a piece of paper that is used to acquire another piece of paper: an employment contract.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana