Quotes by Philosophers - Page 242

When, at a closer glance, so many objects are questionable, when all knowledge seems to be clothed in a kind of deep unknowing, why do we still place any trust at all in reality as it appears to us, in the world in which we seem to live?
Markus Gabriel
And all are asleep,so all are foolish. Don't feel offended. Thefacts have to be stated as they are.You function in sleep; that's why you go on stumbling,you go on doing things you don't want to do, you go on doing things you have decided not to do. You go on doing things you know are not right to do, and you don't do things that you know are right. How is this possible? Why can't you walk straight? Why do you go on getting trapped into bypaths? Why do you go on going astray? This is what is happening. Watch your life--everything that you go on demanding is so confused and so confusiing. You are not alert. You can't see, you can't heart-- certainly you have ears so you can hear, but there is nobody inside to understand it. Certainly you have eyes so you can see,but there is nobody present inside. So your eyes go on seeing and your ears go on listening, but nothing is understood. And on each step you stumble, on each step you commit something wrong. And still you go on believing that you are aware.
Osho
It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.
Bertrand Russell
Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.
Noam Chomsky
I have never been able to make out," I began, "why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry.We men--lawyers, mechanics, or what not--may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva must have practised the divine art seated at His feet.
Rabindranath Tagore
We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys--instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.
G.K. Chesterton
Genius is in you, but like a seed, you determine whether it dies or grows.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Life enslaves the poor by giving them problems that money can resolve, or, dissolve
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.
Søren Kierkegaard
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
Fire destroys that which feeds it.
Simone Weil
Miracles are waiting for you. All you have to do is go and meet them
Bangambiki Habyarimana
He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
G.K. Chesterton
My library is an archive of longings.
Susan Sontag
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
Aristotle
Skill to do comes of doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,things standing shall fall,but the moving ever shall stay.
Basava
Know truth. Respect facts. Doubt opinions. Reject lies.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.
Erich Fromm
I would more appropriately define mastery as the technical ability possible within the constraints of your particular existence. It must be noted that this is a subjective definition, and that this degree of mastery would be individual to each of us.
Chris Matakas
Our knowledge can only be finite while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl Popper
Wir werden alt und grau. Wir werden eines Tages verschlissen sein und aus der Welt verschwinden. Mit unseren Träumen ist das anders. Sie können in anderen Menschen weiterleben, wenn es uns schon längst, längst nicht mehr gibt.
Jostein Gaarder
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
Thomas Paine
If the world gives you a thousand reasons to cry, find a thousand and one reasons to smile.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.
Confucius
You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.
Slavoj Žižek
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The tyrant dies and his rule is over the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren Kierkegaard
If you aspire to the highest place it is no disgrace to stop at the second or even the third place.
Cicero
One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.
Criss Jami
Bruises from a friend are better than kisses from an enemy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.
Plato
(To the haters) You are not extinguishing the bright lights of mankind, you're simply burying yourself in an unmarked grave.
Stefan Molyneux
The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences.... Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences.... So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is false, she may be able to accomplish her goal without the use of inductive inferences.... When a scientist collects experimental data, her aim might be to show that a particular theory...is false. She will have to resort to inductive reasoning.... So Popper's attempt to show that science can get by without induction does not succeed.
Samir Okasha
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
An entrepreneur is not deterred by his lack of perfection, he knows no one else is
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When people smile at a rich man, they are smiling at his wallet.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau
In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de miseres!
Schopenhauer
We are certainly descendents of the sea for our tears are salted and when we shed them on the jowl of time, the sea that has always been within us flows on our face.
Sorin Cerin
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
Erich Fromm
Validate yourself and know that you can achieve great things.
Gift Gugu Mona
It is in vain to try and kick the wind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most rewarding times are those spent in changing lives for the sake of humanity.
Gift Gugu Mona
If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Would it not therefore be wiser in moral concerns to acquiesce in the judgement of common reason, or at most only to call in philosophy for the purpose of rendering the system of morals more complete and intelligible, and its rules more convenient for use (especially for disputation), but not so as to draw off the common understanding from its happy simplicity, or to bring it by means of philosophy into a new path of inquiry and instruction?
Immanuel Kant
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge.
Christopher Langan
Know what you want. Pursue what you need. Realize what you ought. Attain what you desire.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Some women would not have contracted an STD or STDs had they not been on the pill.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities.
José Ortega y Gasset
The day you leave, this will be your only contentment: if you have made the existence a little more beautiful.
Osho
I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.
John Zerzan
...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.
Ayn Rand
... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.
Muriel Barbery
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Walter Benjamin
Don’t try to silence other people’s genius because you’re too deaf to hear your own.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson