Quotes by Philosophers - Page 243

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are to love God most importantly so that we can grow to love people as he loved us, not so that we can feel more divine and worthy than the worldly.
Criss Jami
According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man.
Neel Burton
[I]n any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for 'something to be done,' but by patient study of the eternal laws.
Henry Whitehead
We will never be more than we are meant to be!
Sorin Cerin
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
Willard Van Orman Quine
The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.
Nicholas Murray Butler
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All things flow nothing abides.
Heraclitus
I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
Henry David Thoreau
L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.
Michel de Montaigne
Never stop dreaming, wake up and chase your dreams.
Gift Gugu Mona
To be blind momentarily when light hits your eyes is better than to be blind permanently when darkness hits your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand.
Noam Chomsky
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
G.K. Chesterton
You have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems. They will be part of another world. Don´t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.
Osho
I believe the devil exists in those little, seemingly unnoticeable moments when we choose to value our own insecurities over the service of others.
Chris Matakas
Nietzsche lampooned the romantics of his day (a half century later), noting that "they muddy the waters to make them look deep.
Robert Solomon
But if you do not wish to die of thirst in the desert, drink charity. This is the fountain the Lord has willed to place here, lest we faint on the way, and we shall drink it more abundantly when we come to the Fatherland.
Augustine of Hippo
The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else and run away even before he comes near them the fly lights upon his very nose.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is a stranger's sojourn a night at an inn.
Marcus Aurelius
A physical wound may heal, but a spiritual one may last for ever
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?
Michel Montaigne
What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
Sam Harris
No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?
Rebecca Goldstein
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.
Johann Georg Hamann
If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.
Thomas Paine
With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.
Michael Hardt
To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.
George Santayana
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
Immanuel Kant
The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
Ivan Illich
An oak tree is just a small nut that persevered against the taunts of doubt and fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[It] is nevertheless better than the theological concept, of deriving morality from a divine, all-perfect will, not merely because we do not intuit this perfection, but can derive it solely from our concepts, of which morality is the foremost one, but because if we do not do this (which, if we did, would be a crude circle in explanation), the concept of his will that is left over to us, the attributes of the desire for glory and domination, bound up with frightful representations of power and vengeance, would have to make a foundation for a system of morals that is directly opposed to morality.
Immanuel Kant
I am going and I don't know where I am going. I leave you searching for answers. When I get there, if there is any way to come back either spiritually or physically or through a revelation, I will let you know what I have experienced. Of course some will not believe me or the one I send
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some of the most polished ideas are discovered through healthy, honest debate, so if you don't argue with yourself every once in a while, other people will gladly point out if, in any sense, you missed a spot.
Criss Jami
We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own, the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou will fix the limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Man cannot be homophobic without having concerned himself with another’s sex life.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
Aristotle
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
A bad friend is is worse than an enemy, an enemy you can see and avoid, but to detect an insincere friend is hard
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.
Roger Scruton
That most pleasant weather to feel is the one never felt.
Criss Jami
There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.
Criss Jami
You are the space in which these thoughts arise, but not the thoughts themselves.
Chris Matakas
Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of that term, toward something that I cheerfully and readily acknowledge to be absolutely incomprehensible to me?(...) No man can be sure that he is in faith; and we can say of no man with certainty that he has or does not have faith. (...)Not only does faith always carry its opposite uncertainty within itself, but also this faith is never a static condition that is -had-, but a movement toward... And toward what? In the nature of the case we cannot state this "what." We cannot make a flat assertion about our faith like a simple assertion that we have blue eyes or are six feet tall. More than this, the affirmation of our faith can never be made in the simple indicative mood at all. The statement "I believe" can only be uttered as a prayer.
William Barrett
Compassion is the basis of all morality
Arthur Schopenhauer
Make your wife happier, children wiser, yourself kinder, and you will make your life better.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.
Criss Jami
Yes an atheist priest can perfectly minister to a believing congregation and miracles can happen in that congregation. Miracles depend on the faith of the believer, not that of the officiant. A bartender who never takes alcohol can serve alcohol to his clients. What is necessary is that the priest believes he is doing the good work. The congregation needs faith and it helps them. It would be evil to deny them such a service in the name of his lack of faith. - Bangambiki Habyarimana
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A woman, who considers herself to be mature, has every right to insist certain respectful expectations be met by a man, but not if her behavior is consistently childish, selfish, foolish or disrespectful. Man and woman should strive to bring values to the table that are worthy of mutual honor. Mature men won't tolerate nonsense, but baby-boys will.
T.F. Hodge
For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
Søren Kierkegaard
If you point to paradise, all the shortsighted will see is your finger.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For what the Spirit sees becomes a truthAnd what the soul imagines is made a world
Sri Aurobindo
When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.
Criss Jami
Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective.
Criss Jami
When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
Ayn Rand
... It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
A.J. Ayer
Mastery does not exist.
Chris Matakas
Teachers are in your life to guide you.Friends are in your life to support you.Parents are in your life to bless you.Enemies are in your life to strengthen you.
Matshona Dhliwayo