Quotes by Philosophers - Page 239

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.
William Barrett
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life the whole aim and end of human existence
Aristotle
A man must have very eminent qualities to hold his own without being polite.
Jean de La Bruyère
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.
Roger Scruton
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
Albert Camus
Happy the man who knows his duties!
Christian Furchtegott Gellert
By becoming aware of how you eat your eating will become a rich experience blessed with tasteful flavor, joyful texture, a deep sense of gratitude, and pleasurable contentment.
Ilchi Lee
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
No one can surely know what knowledge is without the presence of truth.
Sorin Cerin
Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!
Allen Ginsberg
He, being hacked and cut for three solid quarters of an hour by the vigorous hands that had taken charge of his education, was soon nothing but a single wound, from which blood spurted out on all sides.
Marquis de Sade
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we will not find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
Albert Camus
One who is thankful for a slice of bread is more blessedthan one who is ungrateful for a loaf.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A practice of giving [it] your best, means you don't just have to hope for it.
T.F. Hodge
Appreciate the creation, respect the creator of it, and admire the source of all creativity.
T.F. Hodge
You can't have it both ways. Either you believe in my god or you go to hell
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Science says: "We must live " and seeks the means of prolonging increasing facilitating and amplifying life of making it tolerable and acceptable wisdom says: "We must die " and seeks how to make us die well.
Miguel de Unamuno
Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.
Olaf Stapledon
The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand, we can rely on what our reason tells us because that is the same for everyone
Jostein Gaarder
Only the vanquished remember history.
Marshall McLuhan
There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
I have previously reduced the whole science of logic to two facts.The first is that our perceptions being every thing for us, we areperfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of whatever we actually feel.The second is that consequently none of our judgments, separatelytaken, can be erroneous: inasmuch as we see one idea in another it isactually there; but their falsity, when it takes place, is purely relativeto anterior judgments, which we permit to subsist; and it consists inthis, that we believe the idea in which we perceive a new element tobe the same as that we have always had under the same sign, when itis really different, since the new element which we actually see thereis incompatible with some of those which we have previously seen;so that to avoid contradiction we must either take away the former ornot admit the latter.
Antoine Destutt de Tracy
It is politics to please and hoodwink thoseWho flatter but despise us.
Thiruvalluvar
Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Because no one is walking in your shoes, only you feel the sores on your feet.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.
Marcus Aurelius
It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can really be maintained, so as to carry not a little conviction, is this: that where such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin.
G.K. Chesterton
stick to truth and we shall succeed, may be slowly, but surely.
Swami Vivekananda
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
Daniel C. Dennett
If truth is like the terrain, are we the generation who sees it as one who has worn shoes all his life or one who has never worn shoes? Yet still, even if the walk starts out as painful, the experience may be well worth it.
Criss Jami
At the end of faith there is always some calamity
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Better to accept whatever happens.
Horace
The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.
Friedrich A. Hayek
There’s no logical connection between being smart and having money.
Christopher Langan
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
Simone Weil
Truth’s nakedness is not concerned with whom it strikes - painfully, or with pleasure; responding appropriately to its ingenuous temperament, however, rewards perceptions of unbiased transparency.
T.F. Hodge
In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know howhigh is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, inChina there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world isa small village, with how many morons should we have to cometo terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It's the same theworld over, or the world is the same wherever you go!
Carl William Brown
[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion.
Edward Carpenter
Don't let them tell us stories
Albert Camus
The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power.
Susan Sontag
Men like to borrow kisses because they know they will have to pay them back.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man but for this to endure it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
Aldous Huxley
Be better than yesterday.
T.F. Hodge
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
G.K. Chesterton
He who has not faith in others shall find no faith in them.
Lao Tzu
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
The musician who always plays on the same string is laughed at.
Horace
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
Martin Buber
Anger is loud, rage is deafening, and wrath is thunderous; only love can silence them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.
Cicero
We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.We must not as for more.
Karl R. Popper
We die as often as we lose a friend.
Publilius Syrus
No one could ever meet death for his country without the hope of immortality.
Cicero
If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.
Roger Scruton