Quotes by Philosophers - Page 246

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
Lead rationally.Lead responsibly.Lead resiliently.Lead reliably.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.
Noam Chomsky
No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny,cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy
Allen Ginsberg
It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
Ayn Rand
...Opinion without a rational process.
Ayn Rand
How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
Jostein Gaarder
Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive "spirituality" probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game.
Dallas Willard
The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. *Vast*, beyond the powers of individual or collective cognition; *invisible*, in its fundamental forms; *overwhelming*, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck *with* a spectator, but a shipwreck *of* the spectator.
Alberto Toscano
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is lightning that strikes, not thunder.
Matshona Dhliwayo
From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.
John N Gray
Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.
Criss Jami
The world is full of angels; if you can’t find one, be one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.
Noam Chomsky
To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No one reaches a high position without daring.
Publilius Syrus
It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.
John C. Lennox
Life is a dark stage on which you were born to shine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The lowest wisdom of the wise is greater than the highest wisdom of fools.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.
Thomas Hobbes
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
To help yourself, help others; to help others, help yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event
Gaston Bachelard
The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive
Stefan Molyneux
Une philosophie doit etre portative.
Paul Valéry
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
Alain de Botton
A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.
Criss Jami
Once you show someone your true colors it is impossible to paint over them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past present and future state and at others whom it affects and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
Alain de Botton
Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!
Seneca
Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of a man.
Thomas Reid
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.
Albert Schweitzer
Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.
Ayn Rand
And because the condition of man . . . is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can to defend ourselves.
Thomas Hobbes
The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.
Henry David Thoreau
Suppose I try saying something. What way do I have of knowing that if I say I know something I don't really not know it? Or what way do I have of knowing that if I say I don't know something I don't really in fact know it?
Zhuangzi
Clever talk, ingratiating looks, fawning reverence: Tso-ch’iu Ming found that shameful, and so do I. Friendly while harboring resentment: Tso-ch’iu Ming found that shameful, too, and so do I.
Confucius
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.
Brand Blanshard
The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded each sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
Iris Murdoch
Wisdom knows the way. Understanding sees the way. Passion feels the way. Love goes all the way.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
Criss Jami
One must not hope to be more than one can be.
Nicolas de Chamfort
To a misogynist: To err is woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)
David Bentley Hart
...sin is separation.
Paul Tillich
When you count your blessings, count life twice.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.
Bertrand Russell
Usually without realizing it, our ultimate peace starts and ends in the authority of God alone, which means the solution to living in joy, peace, and harmony with our fellow men has been here for all since the beginning of mankind and throughout civilization. I have yet to feel the urge to argue politics: it reminds me of getting off the freeway to sit in raging traffic.
Criss Jami
Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufactures, inshort, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.
Adam Smith
Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone.
Emil M. Cioran
Life: It is better not to wrap philosophy around such an inconceivable evolving beautiful mystery. If based on perception, alone; whatever the conclusion - it is still guessing.
T.F. Hodge