Quotes by Philosophers - Page 263

Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have written the system himself, or procured it to be written in his life time. But there is no publication extant authenticated with his name. All the books called the New Testament were written after his death. He was a Jew by birth and by profession.
Thomas Paine
Don't tell your friend you are fighting with your wife, it gives him pleasure
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Many men think the same way about women, treating them as stars. They admire us from a distance, solely because of our appearance. And when some of them eventually decide to approach the ones they long to be with, they often get burnt.
Marcin Dolecki
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson
…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
To know oneself one should assert oneself.
Albert Camus
A man who wants to imitate the life of a woman will invariably do some mischief
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.
Criss Jami
Am I a man of great wisdom? Hardly! Even when a simple person brings me a question, my mind goes utterly blank, I just thrash it out until I’ve exhausted every possibility.
Confucius
Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
A flower does not diminish in beauty, no matter how many weeds envy it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A modest man never talks of himself.
Jean de La Bruyère
The garden of your dreams is watered by the sweat of excellence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.
Albert Camus
The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
A step towards love is a leap towards the divine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Henry David Thoreau
P26 - Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
Paulo Freire
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
You will be able to live as your authentic self when you find that infinite source of energy and that mind, bright and shining like the sun. Then you won’t need to become anyone other than yourself. You won’t need to depend on externals for your health and happiness, and you won’t need to look outside yourself to find passion and hope for life.
Ilchi Lee
The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.
Karl Marx
... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...
Niccolò Machiavelli
Remember, it is ultimately your mind which makes anything attractive or unattractive. It is you who is the deciding factor.
Osho
Not everybody that says that you suck is a hater. There are people who suck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.
Alain de Botton
If you understood him, it would not be God.
Augustine of Hippo
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.
Emil M. Cioran
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx
Success needs no authorization, yet failure requires permission.
T.F. Hodge
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival.
Bertrand Russell
Practicing what you preach is the world’s most eloquent sermon.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The ideal man, takes joy in doing favours for others; but he feels ashamed to have others do favours for him. For it is a mark of superiority to confer a kindness; but it is a mark of inferiority to receive it.
Aristotle
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
Alan W. Watts
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
G.K. Chesterton
Great leaders think beyond yesterday, deal with the issues of today and focus on addressing the problems of tomorrow.
Gift Gugu Mona
There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole its body brevity and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still."And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.
Dante Alighieri
I claim neither liberalism nor conservatism - one tends to be airheaded while the other tends to be brickheaded.
Criss Jami
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, -- that we find we have (a common Nature) -- one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scorned and torn, former love mates aim and shoot childish devastating daggers that penetrate beyond target to pierce the heart of their offspring.
T.F. Hodge
A smile is the most beautiful thing you can wear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.
Derek Parfit
If you want to know how negative you are, pay attention to how much you hate negativity in other people. Fragile, artificial positivity needs always to be surrounded by more positivity in order to stay positive, but the ability to be positive, happy, and even, at times, appreciative around 'negative people' is the mark of real positivity.
Criss Jami
You are better than your past, greater than your present, and brighter than your future.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The cheapest thing in your life is money; the most expensive, love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Whoever blushes is already guilty true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation... Will replaces vision; temporality of the act outsts the eternity of the "good-in-itself"As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent. Then the facing of his morality would simply warrant the reaction "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." There is no point in caring for what has no sanction behind it in any creative intention.
Hans Jonas
P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty
Ivan Illich
Flowers still have to stretch to bloom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
John Ruskin
Be as wise as a fox. Be as harmless as a dove.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm
My suggestion, then, is that we accord the fetus no higher moral status than we give to a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel and so on. Because no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Until a fetus has some capacity for conscious experience, an abortion terminates an existence that is – considered as it is and not in terms of its potential – more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow.
Peter Singer
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stéphane Lupasco
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".
G.K. Chesterton
Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.
Friedrich Nietzsche