Quotes by Philosophers - Page 258

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,
Peter Singer
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.", May 16, 1767)
Voltaire
And whenever you look at somebody as an enemy,you never look deep,you never look into the eye, you avoid. Don't be a fighter, be a lover.
Osho
The greater a man’s folly, the greater his enslavement. The wiser a man is, the greater his freedom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A bird does not give up flying today because it couldn't find any worms yesterday.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.
Allen Ginsberg
To know that you do not know is the best.To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.
Lao Tzu
Unorganized morality is called sociability. Organized morality is called civilization. Unorganized immorality is called barbarity. Organized immorality is called statism.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Love is a sweet dream until the hand of reality wakes you up
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President-because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around with it-and Bush refused to read it. The Oath of Of­fice says something about, ”I promise to do this, that, and the other thing,” and Bush added the words, ”so help me God.” Well, that’s illegal: he’s not President, if anybody cares.
Noam Chomsky
When you look into your soulmates eyes, you see the world; into your soulmates heart, you see the sky, and into your soulmates soul, you see the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.
Erich Fromm
What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?
Voltaire
He who falls, falls by his own will; and he who stands, stands by God's will.
Augustine of Hippo
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
While a creator does and must worship Man (which means his own highest potentiality; which is his natural self-reverence), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective). These are two entirely different conceptions, with entirely - (immensely and diametrically opposed) - different consequences.
Ayn Rand
[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon
What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.
James P. Carse
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all want to become more than we are, we want to live forever, that is why we hate death and create the afterlife.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A rose started off a bud, a bird started off an egg, and a forest started off a seed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.
Miguel de Unamuno
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present which seldom happens to us.
Jean de La Bruyère
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals
Colin Wilson
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.
Hannah Arendt
I have been given the rare opportunity to teach Jiu Jitsu for a living. This is a privilege that I wake up everyday grateful for, and a responsibility that I hold dearly. I understand how rare it is to be employed through a labor you genuinely love, and one which can be used as a vehicle for positive change in the lives of others. Even rarer still, I am often reminded of the quality of Jiu Jitsu I have learned, and the opportunity to have learned it.
Chris Matakas
In an extroverted society, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that an introvert is often unconsciously deemed guilty until proven innocent.
Criss Jami
We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!
Friedrich Nietzsche
We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils
Jostein Gaarder
If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
Simone Weil
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
Thomas Paine
What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.
John Mark Reynolds
You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why
Ayn Rand
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus
The faithful man perceives nothing less than opportunity in difficulties. Flowing through his spine, faith and courage work together: Such a man does not fear losing his life, thus he will risk losing it at times in order to empower it. By this he actually values his life more than the man who fears losing his life. It is much like leaping from a window in order to avoid a fire yet in that most crucial moment knowing that God will appear to catch you.
Criss Jami
Perpetual optimism is good for the mind.Perpetual hope is good for the heart.Perpetual faith is good for the heart.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.
Michel de Montaigne
The vision teller tells the vision to unguarded minds' of prey. The programmed.
T.F. Hodge
There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.
Friedrich Schiller
Think of success. Dream of Success. Live for success.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.
Thomas S. Kuhn
Every opportunity with another was an opportunity to serve my fellow man. Every moment alone was a chance to grow and become more of who I already was. I instantly felt how great a life could be, and that was only made possible by service toward others.
Chris Matakas
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
A murderer is a killer without a uniform.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
Voltaire
The mysterious manner in which this growing sense of unity commingles with a sense of utter goodness is worth noting. It arises by no effort of mine; rather does it come to me out of I know not where. Harmony appears gradually and flows through my whole being like music. An infinite tenderness takes possession of me, smoothing away the harsh cynicism which a reiterated experience of human ingratitude and human treachery has driven deeply into my temperament. I feel the fundamental benignity of Nature despite the apparent manifestation of ferocity. Like the sounds of every instrument in an orchestra that is in tune, all things and all people seem to drop into the sweet relationship that subsists within the Great Mother's own heart.
Paul Brunton
Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
Umberto Eco
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Susan Sontag
The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
John Locke
School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it.
Socrates
The witness of solid moral character to a righteous way of life must never be underestimated.
Arthur F. Holmes
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.Quoted in The Situationists and the City, pg. 194
Friedrich Engels