Quotes by Philosophers - Page 249

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”But I wonder if there’s no breaking then there’s no healing, and if there’s no healing then there’s no learning. And if there’s no learning then there’s no struggle. But the struggle is a part of life. So must all hearts be broken?
Albert Camus
Happiness and joy are not the same. For what does the fervent craving for joy mean? It does not mean that we wish at any cost to experience the psychic state of being joyful. We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps all before it, exceeds all measure.
Josef Pieper
In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
Peter Kreeft
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?
Alain Badiou
Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.
Ernest Renan
One good friend is better than a thousand questionable ones.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but moving, growing, working together; even when there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.
Erich Fromm
The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.
Aristotle
Taking good care of your husband or wife is the best way to thank their parent or parents for having taken good care of them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.
Ivan Illich
I know you . . .That you hold insideVast possibilities and dreamsAnd limitless love.
Ilchi Lee
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Alain de Botton
Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren't so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do.
Criss Jami
All good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.
Plato
I may not have had a great background, but I am grateful because nothing could have prepared me for the future than the past I've been through.
Gift Gugu Mona
Music is not my life. My life is music.
Criss Jami
You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time.
Simone de Beauvoir
When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.
Bertrand Russell
Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.
Baruch Spinoza
A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.
Seneca
Nothing closes doors as quickly as constant bad humor, reclamation, whining. Nobody wants to associate themselves with losers.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Love is free, but priceless.Wisdom is precious, but costless.Faith is gentle, but fearless.Joy is scarce, but limitless.Truth is simple, but matchless.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men's opinions of us, forms our true honor.
Friedrich Schiller
A perfect work of art is not the one that has no mistakes. It is the one people will like. Creation is not perfect but god is praised for having created it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Henry David Thoreau
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful… everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
James P. Carse
Language has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone and the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.
Nancy Pearcey
Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.
Michel de Montaigne
One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior
Friedrich Nietzsche
The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
Jean Rostand
The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.
Bertrand Russell
In the soul where Christ savingly is, there He lives. He not only lives without it, so as violently to actuate it, but He lives in it, so that the soul also is alive. Grace in the soul is as much from Christ, as the light in a glass, held out in the sunbeams, is from the sun. But this represents the manner of the communication of grace to the soul only in part; because the glass remains as it was, the nature of it not being at all changed; it is as much without any lightsomeness in its nature as ever. But the soul of a saint receives light from the Sun of Righteousness, in such a manner that its nature is changed, and it becomes properly a luminous thing; not only does the sun shine in the saints, but they also become little suns, partaking of the nature of the Fountain of their light. In this respect, the manner of their derivation of light is like that of the lamps in the tabernacle, rather than that of a reflecting glass; which, though they were lit up by fire from heaven, yet thereby became themselves burning shining things.
Jonathan Edwards
From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
Albert Camus
Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in enforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
David Hume
If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.
Eric Hoffer
Believe me, Eugenie, the words "vice" and "virtue" supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized.
Marquis de Sade
There are two ways to slide easily through life to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski
The say money talks, but I've seen it sing, and even seen it dance.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I did not know what I was going to do with my life; before anything else I wanted to find an answer, my answer, to the timeless questions, and then after that I would decide what I would become. If I did not begin by discovering what was the grand purpose of life on earth, I said to myself, how would I be able to discover the purpose of my tiny ephemeral life? And if I did not give my life a purpose, how would I be able to engage in action? I was not interested in finding what life's purpose was objectively - this, I divined, was impossible and futile - but simply what purpose I, of my own free will, could give it in accord with my spiritual and intellectual needs. Whether or not this purpose was the true one did not, at that time, have any great significance for me. The important thing was that I should find (should create) a purpose congruent with my own self, and thus, by following it, reel out my particular desires and abilities to the furthest possible limit. For then at last I would be collaborating harmoniously with the totality of the universe.
Nikos Kazantzakis
When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call it a mere coincidence. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward, depending on whether the event was negative or positive for the recipient. If we cannot find a reason for the two events' occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu's answer: It's all in how you think.
Liezi
There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
Will Durant
And since the portions of both the large and the small are equal in amount, in this way too all things would be in everything; nor can they be separate, but all things have a portion of everything. Since there cannot be a smallest, nothing can be separated or come to be by itself, but as in the beginning now too all things are together. But in all things there are many things, equal in amount, both in the larger and the smaller of the things being separated off.
Anaxagoras
Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Thinking outside of the box is unnecessary when there are no boxes in your imagination.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.
Ayn Rand
They laboriously do nothing.
Seneca
The enlightened worry less than others,quarrel less than others,fight less than others,transgress less than others;care more than others,give more than others,and love more than others.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To see a man’s true colors, tell him you’re saving yourself for marriage. To see a woman’s true colors, tell her you’re poor.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Anger has strength, hate has might, but love has power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
Voltaire
It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
G.K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
G.K. Chesterton
No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then only your mask is related, not you. Whenever such a thing happens, there are four persons in the relationship, not two. Two false persons go on meeting, and the two real persons remain worlds apart.
Osho
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
Norbert Wiener