Quotes by Philosophers - Page 266

...[T]he really important thing is not to live, but to live well... [a]nd to live well means the same thing as to live honourably or rightly...
Socrates
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
Yehuda HaLevi
Some people are bringing the business tricks of scarcity mentality into God's mind. They will tell you that only a few will see God. Why? God's heart is infinitely huge, his arms infinitely large that all of us can have a place in him
Bangambiki Habyarimana
With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.
Nikos Kazantzakis
All forms of fear produce fatigue.
Bertrand Russell
Life among clones would not be worth living, and a sane person will only rejoice that others have abilities that they do not share. That should be elementary.
Noam Chomsky
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
Susan Sontag
Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of man.
Confucius
Good things when short are twice as good.
Baltasar Gracián
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
Albert Camus
Reason begets honesty, and honesty, if given its head, begets confidence; so consequently, there is a sort of grand authority in the stances of those who know why they are standing.
Criss Jami
Scholars love knowledge.Philosophers love wisdom.The most knowledgeable become professors.The most wise become sages.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.
Criss Jami
To forgive is a gift of God that permits us to let go of our past hurts.
Jean Vanier
There's no weakness as great as false strength.
Stefan Molyneux
Bricks on your back are easier to carry than pebbles on your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
John Ruskin
There is another more psychological obstacle to the full development of love in the modern world, and that is the fear that many people feel of not preserving their individuality in tact. This is a foolish and rather modern terror. Individuality is not an end in itself; it is something that must enter into fructifying contact with the world, and in so doing must lose its separateness. An individuality which is kept in a glass case withers, whereas on e that is freely expended in human contacts becomes enriched.
Bertrand Russell
Taqwā means to protect oneself against the harmful or evil consequences of one's conduct. If, then, by "fear of God" one means fear of the consequences of one's actions—whether in this world or the next (fear of punishment of the Last Day)—one is absolutely right. In other words, it is the fear that comes from an acute sense of responsibility, here and in the hereafter, and not the fear of a wolf or of an uncanny tyrant, for the God of the Qur’ān has unbounded mercy—although He also wields dire punishment, both in this world and in the hereafter.
Fazlur Rahman
For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'.
Muriel Barbery
Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.
Criss Jami
Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.
Criss Jami
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
Emil M. Cioran
Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?
Marquis de Sade
Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Science gave us forensics. Law gave us crime.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hatred is as much an attachment as desire. Love liberates.
Chaitanya
Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?
Guy Debord
If you have no one, you are poor; if you have an acquaintance, you are fortunate; if you have a friend, you are privileged; if you have a lover, you are rich; if you have a soulmate, you are wealthy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When love invades your life, it captures your heart, imprisons your mind, and frees your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Faithfulness imparts God's reason for all circumstances. No matter what the world says, losing is no longer an option.
Criss Jami
One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
Thomas Paine
And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles, he has not lived long – he has existed long. For what if you should think that man had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbour, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about.
Seneca
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
Ayn Rand
The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Hannah Arendt
Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what the circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is a man's most admirable quality.
Ayn Rand
Your darkest experiences often lead you to your brightest fortunes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
Aldous Huxley
Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
John Rawls
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
F.H. Bradley
By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there. McLuhan CD-ROM
Marshall McLuhan
No great thing is created suddenly.
Epictetus
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
The high prize of life the crowning fortune of man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
Michel Montaigne
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone the mind those of the past and future as well.
Epicurus
When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.
Seneca
When destiny is calling even the deaf can hear him.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that by the mercy of God they who are endowed with true piety of life if they have the skill for ruling people should also have the power.
Augustine of Hippo
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awake, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There are two important days in your life. The day you discovered you were alive and the day you forgot about it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.
Peter Rollins
He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright
Blaise Pascal
Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, largerphenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease oftime; life, again, a disease of matter.Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itselfis only an infirmity of God.
Emil M. Cioran
People who excuse their faults and claim they didn't deserved to be punished - there are lots of them. But those who don't excuse their faults and admit they didn't deserve to be spared - they are few.
Zhuangzi