Quotes by Philosophers - Page 261

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What an educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
Paulo Freire
There are some remedies worse than the disease.
Publilius Syrus
I am the way into the city of woe,I am the way into eternal pain,I am the way to go among the lost.Justice caused my high architect to move,Divine omnipotence created me,The highest wisdom, and the primal love.Before me there were no created thingsBut those that last forever—as do I.Abandon all hope you who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis
If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
G.K. Chesterton
An Oak tree is a daily reminder that great things often have small beginnings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.
Aldous Huxley
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
Alain de Botton
Have nuts and be nuts.
Criss Jami
If you are distressed by anything external the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.
Susan Sontag
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?
Judith Butler
A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
There are 2 kinds of artists, essentially: those who want to make something popular, and those who want to make something dignified. But then there is still that rare hybrid case, and perhaps by that unintentional stroke of genius, in which one's work uncontrollably becomes both popular and dignified yet beyond its time.
Criss Jami
There are thousands of languages around the world, but love is the most beautiful of them all.
Matshona Dhliwayo
... it is because we have acquired technical knowledge without understanding the total process of life that technology has become a means of destroying ourselves
Krishnamurti
Opportunity and risk come in pairs
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular. A systematic ribbon and button maker can become unpopular but essentially is not at all, inasmuch as he does not mean much by the very odd things he says (alas, and this is a popular art!). Socrates, on the other hand, was the most unpopular in Greece because he said the same thing as the simplest person but meant infinitely much by it. To be able to stick to one thing, to stick to it with ethical passion and undauntedness of spirit, to see the intrinsic duplexity of this one thought with the same impartiality, and at one and the same time to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and highest comedy―this is unpopular in any age for anyone who has not realized that immediacy is over. But neither can what is essentially unpopular be learned by rote. More on that later.
Søren Kierkegaard
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
Aristotle
I asked a man who took a death boat to Europe across the treachelous waters of the Mediterranean from Libya"Why are you taking this death boat". "I am already dead." He said. This is my coffin. If I succeed to get to the other side, I get a new life. If I fail, I loose nothing. I remain what I am now: Dead.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
Expand your mind. Nurture your heart. Develop your body. Cultivate your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James
One has to get rid of the self. Once the self is thrown away, nothing is lacking. You start overflowing and blossoms start falling on you.
Osho
What sort of adventures?' I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Our whole education system is calculated to produce *feelings* in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out...Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are 'pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims,eternal principles.
Max Stirner
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
I am a citizen not of Athens or Greece but of the world.
Socrates
Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
Everybody's serious but me.
Allen Ginsberg
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
Peter Sloterdijk
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
John Ruskin
Sometimes you will do good things and not get an acknowledgement for it. Don't let that dishearten you, the world is a better place with your good deeds.
Gift Gugu Mona
it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.
Jean Baudrillard
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.
Aristotle
For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them
Seneca
Though you are as a drop in the ocean, without you, the universe would be empty.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Stanisław Lem
How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Competition works best in sports, but humans get addicted to stuff.
Criss Jami
The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him.
Ayn Rand
The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
Charles Sanders Peirce
An atheist who is a statist is just another theist.
Stefan Molyneux
So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!
Jean-Paul Sartre
So if you understand that where there is a search for pleasure there must be pain, live that way if you want to, but don't just slip into it. If you want to end pleasure, though, which is to end pain, you must be totally attentive to the whole structure of pleasure - not cut it out as monks and sannyasis do, never looking at a woman because they think it is a sin and thereby destroying the vitality of their understanding - but seeing the whole meaning and significance of pleasure. Then you will have tremendous joy in life. You cannot think about joy. Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
Jostein Gaarder
The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically given - that is to say, is substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away. Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly.
Arthur Schopenhauer
But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Word Powers:A beautiful bitch has four legs, not two. Even terms of, so called, endearment have unintended manifestations. Guard your grill.
T.F. Hodge
If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.
Herbert Butterfield
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...
Robert M. Pirsig
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
Life is too short to listen to fools, and too important to ignore the wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.
Stefan Molyneux