Quotes by Philosophers - Page 260

Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning.
Colin Wilson
The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit (advantage) nor harm, but from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself.
Epictetus
Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--the person is alone, like a baleful power--as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually--and in accordance with his own principle he is--misanthropic and misotheos.
Novalis
Joy gives you strength.Hope gives you fortitude.Faith gives you courage.Love gives you power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Never allow yourself to be defined by your past; ‘yesterday’ is just a word, not a dictionary.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your strength is your ticket to persistence.Your mind is your ticket to brilliance.Your heart is your ticket to excellence.Your soul is your ticket to transcendence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.
Voltaire
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
Paying the high cost of education is better than paying the high price of ignorance.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.
William Barrett
It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one—which is what happens most of the time.
Neel Burton
If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What’s so special about humans...?', I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What’s so special about that?
Shelly Kagan
I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing.
Albert Camus
Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.
Jostein Gaarder
The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.
Vauvenargues
Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review is what got me started reading Tolstoy in the first place. How can anyone write without using metaphor and simile? That would be like—never mind.)
John Mark Reynolds
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato
When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.
Søren Kierkegaard
If the road to your dreams is full of potholes, take the highway.
Matshona Dhliwayo
respect life,revere life.there is nothing more holy than life,nothing more divine than life.
Osho
Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?
Voltaire
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
Aldous Huxley
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise.
Solomon
Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.
Epicurus
The greatest leaders are the greatest servants.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When fear and suffering are disliked by me and others equally what is so special about me that I protect myself and not the other?
Śāntideva
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
Seneca
Some cats are angry at being called cats. To achieve peace with them, never call them by their real name
Bangambiki Habyarimana
See what no one else can see.Be what no one else can be.Do what no one else can do.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
Max Weber
A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.
Socrates
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole.
W. Norris Clarke
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
Socrates
Time is a wealth of change but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
Rabindranath Tagore
Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.
Vauvenargues
Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.
Sam Harris
Don't cry over spilt milk when you can milk another cow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.
Horace
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
Susan Sontag
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau
The palaces faith builds are greater than the prisons fear creates.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.
Hermann Weyl
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.
Bertrand Russell
Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system
Sebastian Marincolo
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing.
Aristotle
The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.
Denis Diderot
We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive.
Stefan Molyneux
Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others – How did you get that bruise? – would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing.Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.
Sam Harris
Many people hide inside of their “not-knowing” and, afraid of taking the risk, settle for mediocrity in their life. They imitate the same safe, easy life that other people walk. They mistake that for happiness and, inside of it, look for security. However, the moment that the defensive shields we’ve built up come down, all truths reveal themselves and speak to us. When we hear our inner voice and follow it, we can walk our own path.
Ilchi Lee
Oftentimes in reality, the genius is in the position of the antihero. Neither the good guys nor the bad guys really trust him because his truth is universal.
Criss Jami
If you are too good to look after God’s trash, you are not good enough to look after God’s treasure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal
Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
Simone Weil
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
Aristotle
The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles.
Friedrich Nietzsche