Quotes by Philosophers - Page 27

To the contemporary feminist, sexual differences mean inequality, inequality means injustice, and injustice must be stamped out at all costs. And so, they have set about stamping out sexual differences at all costs.
Eric Robert Morse
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You will not live the life of royalty, if you don't understand the meaning of loyalty.
Gift Gugu Mona
We can never succeed in knowing our own self without holidays and anniversaries.
Sorin Cerin
With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money “creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.
Bertrand Russell
We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.
Francis Bacon
If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.
J.W. Dunne
Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future—it is not here and now, and awareness has to be here and now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique. After Shiva’s Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, in these five or ten thousand years, nobody has developed a single method. The cathartic methods are simply to throw all your impatience, your speediness, your hurry, your repressions.
Osho
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution
Aldous Huxley
Experience is hard to acquire. Only the wise acquire it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected. How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.
Marcus Aurelius
I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
Criss Jami
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
John Cage
Often I have found that the one thing that can save is the thing which appears most to threaten ... one has to go down into what one most fears and in that process ... comes a saving flicker of light and energy that even if it does not produce the courage of a hero at any rate enables a trembling mortal to take one step further.
Laurens van der Post
If it be a point of humanity for man to bring health and comfort to man, and especially to mitigate and assuage the grief of others, and by taking from them the sorrow and heaviness of life to restore them to joy, that is to say, to pleasure, why may it not then be said that nature does provoke every man to do the same to himself?
Thomas More
I almost thought that marriage was a cure to loneliness, alas! so many are lonely inside marriage. Then I realized it's not marriage that takes the loneliness away, but when both within marriage honour God and the vows made before Him.
Gift Gugu Mona
To learn the way of the Buddha is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be enlightened by everythingin the world. To be enlightened by everything in the world is to let fall one's own body and mind.
Dogen (1200-1253)
Closing one’s eyes when praying doesn’t increase the odds of the prayer being answered. It merely decreases the odds of being distracted.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
William James
If a fly lands on your food, do not use a hammer to remove it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.
Jacques Derrida
Drama don't arrive by surprise; it is summoned, undisguised.
T.F. Hodge
The lightest weight anyone can carry on life’s journey is hope.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The life I am experiencing, good or bad, is the collective result of the choices I have made, knowingly or unknowingly. When I accept this, I acknowledge that I have the power to create my destiny.
Ilchi Lee
Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.
Alain Badiou
[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy.
Will Durant
Work usually follows will.
William James
We cry when something is sad. Then we often shed a tear when something's beautiful as well. When something's funny or ugly, we laugh. Perhaps we are sad when something is beautiful because we know that it won't last for ever. Then, we start laughing when something is ugly because we understand that it's only a joke.
Jostein Gaarder
Dewey believed that education has a practical function and should not be seen as a series of pointless hurdles to jump over before 'real life' begins. Education isn't a preamble to life; it's part of life, and it exists to solve practical human problems and meet human needs.
Gregory Bassham
Kings struggle to rule over nations,men struggle to rule over themselves;God effortlessly rules the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Any halfway clever devil would decorate the highway to Hell as beautiful as possible.
Criss Jami
God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We must listen to poets.
Gaston Bachelard
Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?
Socrates
If a man would move the world he must first move himself.
Socrates
It is in the shade that you look up at a tree and appreciate its efforts.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What can we do without pain in front of happiness?
Sorin Cerin
A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.
John Stuart Mill
A lion does not earn its crown quarreling with sheep.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If the sun shone for itself, it would be blinded by its own light; if a river flowed for itself, it would be drowned by its own weight.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Institutionalized:Ghetto stars pimped so hard for so long -- they'll starve to pimp themselves behind psychic bars.
T.F. Hodge
If God made us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
Voltaire
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
René Descartes
I would say that introverts make some of the best international philosophers. The less common attribute of the introverted lifestyle - a close societal connection, as such a connection disappears or changes in relevance as the currents of the winds change - leaves too much room for one's own cultural bias. Instead, introverts tend to turn inward, the laboratory of being and all its forms. This is the most accurate study of the individual human being, which is in turn, rather than those affected by cultural limitations, the most universal reflection of human understanding and human behavior.
Criss Jami
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
Ayn Rand
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
Erich Fromm
[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.
Michel Foucault
The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.
Voltaire
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
Simone de Beauvoir
In my opinion, at least, the splendid achievements of Alexander are the clearest possible proof that neither strength of body, nor noble blood, nor success in war even greater than Alexander's own... that none of these things, I say, can make a man happy, unless he can win one more victory in addition to those the world thinks so great---the victory over himself.
Arrian
A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place.The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world.
Stanisław Lem
To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
Alan W. Watts
To be is to do.
Plato
To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.
Victor Cousin
You're given the fruit of one palm tree:Bear it a basin of clear water.Don't trouble with the plight of other palms.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana