Quotes by Philosophers - Page 277

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
Confucius
I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.
Ayn Rand
Silence is better than unmeaning words.
Pythagoras
Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.
Christine M. Korsgaard
f you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.
Seneca
Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
Thomas Aquinas
We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.
Christopher Langan
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
Noam Chomsky
Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Reason in man is rather like God in the world.
Thomas Aquinas
Real loved one's aren't afraid, and will suggest to you, what's in your best interest because they wouldn't want too see you suffer the consequences of, sideways, emotional impulse(s). To see you crash and burn, time after time, is the gratification of 'yes folk' lurking in your corner. You may not agree, but always consider the voice(s) that have consistently kept it real.
T.F. Hodge
But now, if I be marching on with my utmost vigour in that way which, according to the sacred geography, leads straight to Jerusalem, why am I beaten and ill-used by others because, perhaps, I wear not buskins; because my hair is not of the right cut; because, perhaps, I have not been dipped in the right fashion; because I eat flesh upon the road, or some other food which agrees with my stomach; because I avoid certain by-ways, which seem unto me to lead into briars or precipices; because, amongst the several paths that are in the same road, I choose that to walk in which seems to be the straightest and cleanest; because I avoid to keep company with some travellers that are less grave and others that are more sour than they ought to be; or, in fine, because I follow a guide that either is, or is not, clothed in white, or crowned with a mitre?
John Locke
Some people love but will never marry each other. Some are married to but have never loved and will never love each other.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground
Dante Alighieri
As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H. Gass
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Grief gives you a hundred reasons to cry; hope gives you a thousand reasons to smile, joy gives you a million reasons to laugh, and love gives you billion reasons to rejoice.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.
G.K. Chesterton
Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!
Bertrand Russell
Consciousness precedes phenomenon, and therefore consciousness can alter phenomenon.
Shai Tubali
If you have nothing but joy in this life, you are still rich.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
Elbert Hubbard
How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.
Augustine of Hippo
An ugly diamond is still worth more than a beautiful pebble.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Henry David Thoreau
the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
G.K. Chesterton
Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode--a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.
Christos Yannaras
Most people can’t stand spending a few minutes by themself. Yet they expect others to spend an hour, a day, or, even a lifetime, with them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you fish without proper bait, you will only catch disappointment.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Facts are not truths they are not conclusions they are not even premisses but in the nature and parts of premisses.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Teach me O God not to torture myself not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.
Søren Kierkegaard
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
Sam Harris
The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.
Elbert Hubbard
If I could forget you! Is my love then a work of memory? Even if time expunged everything from its tablets, expunged even memory itself, my relation to you would stay just as alive, you would still not be forgotten. If I could forget you! What then should I remember? For after all, I have forgotten myself in order to remember you: so if I forgot you I would come to remember myself; but the moment I remembered myself I would have to remember you again. If I could forget you! What would happen then? There is a picture from antiquity. It depicts Ariadne. She is leaping up from her couch and gazing anxiously after a ship that is hurrying away under full sail. By her side stands Cupid with unstrung bow and drying his eyes. Behind her stands a winged female figure in a helmet. It is usually assumed this is Nemesis. Imagine this picture, imagine it changed a little. Cupid is not weeping and his bow is not unstrung; or would you have become less beautiful, less victorious, if I had become mad? Cupid smiles and bends his bow. Nemesis does not stand inactive by your side; she too draws her bow. In that other picture we see a male figure on the ship, busily occupied. It is assumed it is Theseus. Not so in my picture. He stands on the stern, he looks back longingly, spreads his arms. He has repented, or rather, his madness has left him, but the ship carries him away. Cupid and Nemesis both aim at him, an arrow flies from each bow; their aim is true; one sees that, one understands, they have both hit the same place in his heart, a sign that his love was the Nemesis that wrought vengeance." ―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_
Søren Kierkegaard
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
G.K. Chesterton
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.
Pythagoras
Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.
Criss Jami
Some women’s greatest achievement is sleeping with a man who is rich, famous, and/or wanted by many women, whereas some women’s greatest achievement is refusing to sleep with such a man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.
G.K. Chesterton
Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.
Criss Jami
So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.
Criss Jami
I felt sorry for the inhabitants and went into the forest to admonish the wolf in God's name not to eat any more sheep. I called him, he came—and do you know what his answer was? 'Francis, Francis,' he said, 'do not destroy God's prescribed order. The sheep feeds on grass, the wolf on sheep—that's the way God ordained it. Do not ask why; simply obey God's will and leave me free to enter the sheepfolds whenever I feel the pinch of hunger. I say my prayers just like Your Holiness. I say: "Our Father who reignest in the forests and hast commanded me to eat meat, Thy will be done. Give me this day my daily sheep so that my stomach may be filled, and I shall glorify Thy name. Great art Thou, Lord, who hast created mutton so delicious. And when the day cometh that I shall die, Grant, Lord, that I may be resurrected, and that with me may be resurrected all the sheep I have eaten—so that I may eat them again!"' That, Brother Leo, is what the wolf answered me.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.
Eric Hoffer
People who know their worth understand the power of their own words.
Gift Gugu Mona
The life of truth is cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.
Iris Murdoch
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.
G.K. Chesterton
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend.
Lao Tzu
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.
Albert Camus
We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.
Muriel Barbery
Always remember that you are the observer and not the doer. Do not take life to be anything more than acting. Don’t identify yourself too much with the action.Whether you are a wife or husband, a businessman or client, don’t get too involved. Don’t lose yourself in it, for you are simply playing a role in the play. Keep outside of it, and within yourself. These are all necessary parts of life. You must go to work, it is necessary. The play is delightful if you see it as play, but it is fatal if you take it to be life. There is no reason so disrupt your life. You have to play the part that life has given you.
Osho
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
Lewis Mumford
It is at midnight, not midday, that stars shine the brightest.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary... •tIf you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.
Arthur Schopenhauer