Quotes by Philosophers - Page 274

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.
Robert M. Pirsig
Remember that whatsoever you desire, God is the most dependable provider.
Gift Gugu Mona
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Marcus Aurelius
Imagine a true master of the art, someone with complete skill in every aspect of Jiu Jitsu. This master would not force anything. He would simply allow the roll to take whatever form it does, and in every position would act in the most efficient way based off what the circumstance dictates, and not what he himself prefers.
Chris Matakas
Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are three things that a beggar and a rich person share every day: the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When love intoxicates your heart, it is difficult for your soul to remain sober.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If roses were not special weeds would not envy them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.
Lao Tzu
Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
Pyotr Kropotkin
In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
As the sky is too big for two stars to clash, the world is big enough for all of us to shine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
Alan W. Watts
The caterpillar they despise today is the butterfly they praise tomorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It's impossible to do science without faith. Sometimes scientists build theories on the premises of faulty assumptions until they discover they were in error and begin again from square one until they discover the true theory. It's quite different with theologians, they build false theory upon false theory until they give you detailed descriptions of heaven and hell and construct dogmas to protect their errors and if you dare say they are in error they condemn you to eternal damnation they arrived at through false theories
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Self-awareness - the commendable ability to be yourself without being a nuisance to someone else.
Criss Jami
Walking to success is better than sprinting to failure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't despise people because of their defects or because of their lack of talents and gifts. Imagine if people did it for you, how many friends would you be left with?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Since marriage is for two people, it is difficult to remain in it when one person steps out of it.
Gift Gugu Mona
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
Eric Hoffer
Pray for your needs, not your greed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
True to the GAME (Giving, Affirming, Manifesting, Evolving).
T.F. Hodge
Love is sweet even when what you go through is bitter.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced....Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken pubic support....When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.
Josef Pieper
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.
Alain de Botton
Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The supply of matter in the universe was never more tightly packed than it is now, or more widely spread out. For nothing is ever added to it or subtracted from it. It follows that the movement of atoms today is no different from what it was in bygone ages and always will be. So the things that have regularly come into being will continue to come into being in the same manner; they will be and grow and flourish so far as each is allowed by the laws of nature.
Titus Lucretius Carus
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain de Botton
The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions.
Umberto Eco
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The soul is a prolonged anniversary of our lives in this world.
Sorin Cerin
I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob?"I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold."Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.
Noah Benshea
Jiu Jitsu has given me something to pursue. We all need something to work towards. For people, as well as every piece of matter in the universe, there is no such thing as maintenance. If you are not growing you are decaying. The insidious nature of modern times is that it is so easy not to pursue anything. Societal norms pressure us into jobs we do not like, and the daily comforts of televisions and computers offer much in the way of distraction. If that isn't enough, there is always the numbing effects of alcohol coupled with attention-grabbing sporting events which conveniently run year round so one is never short of stimulus.
Chris Matakas
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
Jean Paul
There are friendships that are greater than family bonds, but they are very rare
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Slaves of wisdom are masters of many.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.
Michel de Montaigne
A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance.
Robert Musil
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
When you reach the mountaintop look upand think of how high you must leap to reach the stars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
Piaget
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
Arthur Schopenhauer
How many things there are which I do not want.
Socrates
Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).
Alain de Botton
What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?
U.G. Krishnamurti
Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.
Manuel De Landa
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, "a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
Eric Hoffer
The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.
Noam Chomsky
This is what’s happening: together we are descending the stairs of the heart, which lead to the sources. (It is a secret staircase. I knew it existed. Which is why I avoided it. Because it leads to the other-life, deep, underground, the fluvial, the painful.)We are in the process of descending into the depths of the heart. To where bodies communicate with each other.
Hélène Cixous
The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
Alfred North Whitehead
In the company of ignorance, be silent...or join the suffering.
T.F. Hodge
People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith
The answer to the question ‘How many children do you have?’ and the one to the question ‘How many children are you raising?’ are not identical in all cases: some men are not taking care of their own children, some are knowingly or unknowingly raising other men’s children, and some do not even know that they each have a child, another child, or other children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Literacy makes man a victim of advertising. Education makes him a victim of employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana