Quotes by Philosophers - Page 252

School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Ayn Rand
It's futile to talk reason to anger
Bangambiki Habyarimana
...It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.
G.K. Chesterton
We must master our good fortune or it will master us.
Publilius Syrus
Better to illuminate than merely to shine to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
Thomas Aquinas
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
G.K. Chesterton
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it.
Erich Fromm
The anti-mind is the anti-life.
Ayn Rand
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
Martin Heidegger
All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A star never lets anything dull its sparkle, not even darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.
Martin Buber
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Albert Camus
Man is the only god of confusion. In a political sense the liberal man is like one shouting over the voice of God thus making it difficult to hear God; the conservative man is like one standing in the way of God, making it difficult to see God.
Criss Jami
The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.
Maurice Blanchot
A tree does not despair when a few of its leaves fall off because there is more room for greener ones to take their place.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and at the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
Henry David Thoreau
It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.
Bertrand Russell
Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease.
T.F. Hodge
... a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.
Mortimer J. Adler
You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Breaking down a closed door is quicker than waiting for someone to answer it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the
Susan Sontag
Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons.
Aristotle
...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
G.K. Chesterton
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides. So on we go—we have a long way—no hurry—just one step after the next—with a little Chautauqua for entertainment -- .Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
Robert M. Pirsig
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
Alain de Botton
Learn to be your own best friend first then you will find true happiness, because happiness is from within.
Gift Gugu Mona
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illich
Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
John Ruskin
The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Keep running; keep dreaming, keep alive the flame of hope; defeat and despair will not catch up with you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those pretended goods that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced, let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour; let not his substance be ravaged from him by cruel imposts; let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence, let him not be driven into that idleness that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death: let his industry be excited; let his talents be rewarded; let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shown to him that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow men, but not on those imaginary beings located in an ideal world.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Calmness is always Godlike.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The sun that warms is also the sun that burns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Wisdom in poverty is better than folly in affluence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A book is a suicide postponed.
Emil M. Cioran
Turbulence does not shake a tree with strong roots.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A friend who betrays you is an enemy.
Gift Gugu Mona
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.
G.K. Chesterton
The fastest way to end an argument with your wife is to admit she’s right.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier.
Stephen Cave
Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If someone can't forgive, it's because he does not love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor W. Adorno
For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.
John Locke
Gino refilled my glass. “What a night. Booze, broads, and a barroom brawl.
Michael Murphy
Love in this life is expanded by our anticipation of the next life. Those who love under God are never satisfied with small love, or love bound by the flaws of human emotion. Those who love under God dream of another life where they can experience it and live it in God's perfect form, so they seek to build it in this life as much as possible.
Criss Jami
Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough.
Robert Skidelsky Edward Skidelsky
Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.
Charles Eisenstein
Statism is an unnatural disaster.
Stefan Molyneux
It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
Thomas More
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
William James