Quotes by Philosophers - Page 271

It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
Søren Kierkegaard
A humble heart, a friendly look, a smile on the face is really what you need to break the ice, not a very big axe.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
Jacques Derrida
If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.
Peter Kreeft
We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To deceive oneself is worse than to deceive others." These harsh words pierced me to the core.
Shinichi Suzuki
The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
Aldous Huxley
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
Francis Bacon
Knowing that you have a soul bright and clear like the sun, perceiving and feeling that soul, you will realize that it is very precious and beautiful. Whenyou consider yourself important and precious, you will begin to feel the same way toward other forms of life and toward the world.
Ilchi Lee
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan W. Watts
If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.
Georges Bataille
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation)
Stanisław Lem
Your mind can imagine what others cannot.Your heart can sense what others cannot.Your soul can receive what others cannot.Your feet can go where others cannot.Your hands can do what others cannot.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As the Great Creatrix, the feminine is no vessel and passage for an alien, masculine Other that condescends towards her, enters into her, and favors her with the seed of living. Life originates in her and issues from her, and the light that appears projected on the night sky, which she is herself, is rooted in her depths. For she is not only the protomantis, the first and great Prophetess, but also she who gives birth to the Spirit-Light, which, like consciousness and the illumination that arises in transformation, is rooted in her creative efficacy. She is the creative Earth, which not only brings forth and swallows life, but as that which transforms also lets the dead thing be resurrected and leads the lower to the higher. All developments and transformations that lead from the simple and insignificant through all gradations of life to the complicated and intricately differentiated fall under her sovereignty. This matriarchal world is geocentric; the stars and signs of the zodiac are the heavenly girdle of the Earth Goddess and are arranged around her as the true center around which everything revolves.
Erich Neumann
We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.
Plato
In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive “result” (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody’s “theory” of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one’s current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let’s not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let’s recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues.
Daniel Dennett
The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not existand the one who exists I do not see.
Kedar Joshi
If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness.
Lao Tzu
Christians sometimes make themselves into elephants afraid of mice. You have the Creator of the universe on your side; not to mention, you've been given eternal life. 'Whom or what shall you fear?' To be afraid of anything other than God himself is like an insult to God.
Criss Jami
When the nest becomes too small a bird is ready to spread its wings and fly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.
Peter Sloterdijk
On athleticism, God knows no favor. It seems rather he is in the business of teaching winners how to lose and losers how to win.
Criss Jami
Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
Voltaire
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
P.D. Ouspensky
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.
Ernst Cassirer
If a flower perseveres through concrete, you can persevere through anything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
Henry David Thoreau
Wind has no home in the world,and therefore wanders everywhere.Light has no home in the universe,and therefore returns to God.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.
Erich Fromm
How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.
Karl Marx
...luck is not to be coerced.
Albert Camus
People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.
Bernard Williams
Racism watching is a puzzle solving activity and often involves debunking pseudo-science. The investigator must try to figure out what makes people believe in weird ideas. As Stieg said in an interview, ‘Fifty years later, people still believe in this; the whole Neo-Nazi movement. There is absolutely no sense in this. They do it contrary to everything science tells us. Contrary to human goodness or altruism, contrary to rational thinking. And this is fascinating, why?
Eric Bronson
It is never crowded at the mountaintop.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
Henry David Thoreau
The humble ones are always learning and improving, and their secret is always that it's a secret.
Criss Jami
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
Rebecca Goldstein
Universe consists of frozen light.
David Bohm
The greatest treasures are not found in museums, but in our hearts.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.
Peter Kreeft
Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.
Aldous Huxley
To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.
Tom Regan
The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).
Stefan Molyneux
From my insufficiency to my perfection, and from my deviation to my equilibriumFrom my sublimity to my beauty, and from my splendor to my majestyFrom my scattering to my gathering, and from my rejection to my communionFrom my baseness to my preciousness, and from my stones to my pearlsFrom my rising to my setting, and from my days to my nightsFrom my luminosity to my darkness, and from my guidance to my strayingFrom my perigee to my apogee, and from the base of my lance to its tipFrom my waxing to my waning, and from the void of my moon to its crescentFrom my pursuit to my flight, and from my steed to my gazelleFrom my breeze to my boughs, and from my boughs to my shadeFrom my shade to my delight, and from my delight to my tormentFrom my torment to my likeness, and from my likeness to my impossibilityFrom my impossibility to my validity, and from my validity to my deficiency.I am no one in existence but myself,
Ibn Arabi
Because most of us recognize that we will fight to protect our children, we cannot be absolute pacifists.
Nel Noddings
If you push your luck too hard, fortune's muscles might tear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Trouble is the place where you find yourself when your judgment malfunction
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Follow your dreams with all of your mind. Chase your dreams with all of your heart. Accomplish your dreams with all of your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Seneca
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
Maurice Blanchot