Quotes by Philosophers - Page 273

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us.
Criss Jami
Works from the soul transcend works from the mind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you press grapes, wine will pour out; if you crush roses, perfume will pour out; if you afflict the talented, genius will pour out.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.
Şeyla Benhabib
Life is worthwhile when you walk on a path aligned to your purpose.
Gift Gugu Mona
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.
Henry David Thoreau
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I never feel unsafe except for when the majority is on my side.
Criss Jami
No one could preach if he seriously looked at his own sins.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
William James
Listen to 'The Voice', not the choice
T.F. Hodge
A lion does not become king of the jungle hunting mice.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.
John Cage
He alone fails who gives up and lies down.
Ralph Waldo Trine
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Francis Bacon
Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.
Aldous Huxley
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
The Master, by residing in the Tao,sets an example for all beings.Because he doesn't display himself,people can see his light.Because he has nothing to prove,people can trust his words.Because he doesn't know who he is,people recognize themselves in him.Because he has no goal in mind,everything he does succeeds.
Lao Tzu
The real frienship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.
Rabindranath Tagore
Taking a leap of faith is better than taking a leap of doubt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Light is shallow; darkness is infinitely deep. Light is always bounded, it has boundaries. Darkness has no boundaries, it is unbounded. Light comes and goes; darkness always is. When there is light you cannot see it. When light is not there you can see it. But it is always there; you cannot cause it. Light has a cause. You burn the fire, you put on wood. When the wood is finished the light will be gone. It is caused, hence it is an effect. But darkness is not caused by anything, it is not an effect. It is uncaused eternity.
Osho
The wheel… is an extension of the foot. The book… is an extension of the eye…Clothing, an extension of the skin…Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
Marshall McLuhan
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus, fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration.
Søren Kierkegaard
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering.
Albert Camus
The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Claiming to love self, but willingly default to cheating at the first sign of trouble is nothing short of playing yourself. Your ego may feel avenged - temporarily - but your heart and soul, the true self, will suffer the long term affects of karma's justifiable sting.
T.F. Hodge
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton
Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.
Confucius
Hell and heaven are within us
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In the presence of the sun nobody sees the stars; excel, and you too will eclipse your competition.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism
Max Scheler
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Prayer and fasting is what every Christian needs because prayer empowers you while fasting humbles you to be a better child of God.
Gift Gugu Mona
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.
Ilyas Kassam
Vex not thy spirit at the course of things they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.
Marcus Aurelius
Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve and bad things are very easy to get.
Confucius
Any coward can be a peacekeeper! In fact, that comes to one naturally. But they are blessed, the peacemakers...and all those who know the difference.
Criss Jami
Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.
Criss Jami
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
Aldous Huxley
On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil.Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.
Stephen Hicks
Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing.
Socrates
Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.
Ayn Rand
When you've made up your mind, no use lagging behind, go ahead and no relenting,Let your youth have free reign, it won't come again, so be bold and no repenting.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it
John Stuart Mill
Fortune is a goddess that reveals herself only to people who seek her
Bangambiki Habyarimana
[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.
Will Durant
people have managed to marry without arithmetic
Geoffrey Chaucer
I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.
Elbert Hubbard
No man is happy who does not think himself so.
Marcus Aurelius
Character is destiny
Heraclitus
We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.
Simone Weil
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.
Albert Camus
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.
Alan W. Watts
When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the oat, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced -- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. Though how in the hell one passes judgement on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.
Ayn Rand