Quotes by Philosophers - Page 259

Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else; it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being... There are NO limits. There are plateus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
Bruce Lee
We choose our friends on the basis of, among other things, our conception of ourselves. That's not to say that friendship is narcissistic, it doesn't follow that we choose people 'like ourselves'; in fact we might choose people very different than ourselves. For example, if I'm not very intelligent, and I'm concerned about my lack of intelligence, I might take up with an extremely intelligent woman, precisely in order to have her intelligence, in some sense, radiate onto me.The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that it's going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him.
Robert C. Solomon
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Michel Foucault
The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.
Syrus
To give a man full knowledge of true morality I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.
John Locke
Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
Paulo Freire
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
Good friends are divine instruments.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Only in the eyes of love you can find infinity.
Sorin Cerin
For my part, the more I went forward in the study of letters, and ever more easily, the greater became the ardour of my devotion to them, until in truth I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva. And -- since I found the armory of logical reasoning more to my liking than the other forms of philosophy, I exchanged all other weapons for these, and to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation.
Pierre Abélard
There is only one path to heaven. On Earth we call it Love.
Ayn Rand
The scholar does not consider gold and jade to be precious treasures, but loyalty and good faith.
Confucius
Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Heidegger
On the Russian revolutionaries:To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, makes for a league of more practical proof than any religious order.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Paul Valéry
In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.
Mark Rowlands
The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.
Augustine of Hippo
Seize time by the forelock.
Pittacus
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
Aristotle
Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed
Paulo Freire
An intelligent man only argues with his wife when she has lost her voice.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.
Miguel de Unamuno
Men are not influenced by things but by their thoughts about things.
Epictetus
Pain was a fascinating horror
Aldous Huxley
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless peacocks and lilies for instance.
John Ruskin
Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.
René Guénon
Speech is the index of the mind.
Seneca
There's no need to curse God if you're an ugly duckling. He chooses those strong enough to endure it so that they can guide others who've felt the same.
Criss Jami
In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.
Bruno Latour
Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Henry David Thoreau
THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ATMAN, THE SOUL.The first meaning is: in this world, only consciousness is yours. The word atman means: that which is your own. Regardless of how much the rest may appear to you as your own, it is alien. All of that which you otherwise claim as yours – friends, loved ones, family, wealth, fame, high position, a great empire – it is all a deception. Because one day death will snatch it all away from you. So death is the criterion for determining who is your own and who is the stranger. That which death can separate you from, know that it didn’t belong to you, and that which it can’t, was indeed your own.
Osho
If you want to be strong, exercise; if you want to be wise, study; if you want to be happy, smile; and if you want to be invincible, love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
Kenneth Boulding
I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.
Erich Fromm
You might be an introvert if you were ready to go home before you left the house.
Criss Jami
Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Herbert Spencer
And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Alan W. Watts
All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
Denis Diderot
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Baltasar Gracián
If there is no reward, there is no reason to run
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you want a meaningful life for yourself don't ask "What can the world offer to me?" but "What can I offer to the world?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Nobody can open the gates of death without closing them again after him.
Sorin Cerin
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.
Marcus Aurelius
Success is across the roaring river, the brave shall cross it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
Noam Chomsky
The first reaction is surely the most natural one, but not always the most correct one; thereupon, the invention of apologies.
Criss Jami
Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.
Blaise Pascal
But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
Jostein Gaarder
Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.
Jostein Gaarder
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stars don't beg the sky to shine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Ayn Rand
There is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source. They begin life trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honor can that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person the inheritance of a whole family of children, or metes out some pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?
Thomas Paine