Quotes by Philosophers - Page 279

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
David Hume
To succeed even once you have to try at least once.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
Epictetus
Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest gift you can open is your heart to someone in need.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
Josef Pieper
God is so omnipotent yet man so impotent, the Divine masterpiece was not even in creating the universe, but in making sin boring to sinners.
Criss Jami
From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse. (What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....
Thomas Nagel
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance arms us with terrible freedom so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge yet not the details but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful manly part or a poor drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions they have a substantial truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Herbert Marcuse
It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.
Henry David Thoreau
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
It often seems as though the silent, humble servant is secretly wiser and more discerning than the haughty master; yet through dutiful (and sometimes insecure) surrender he continues to serve and carry out petty orders in loyal acquiescence.
Criss Jami
...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Experience is not what happens to you it is what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.
John Mark Reynolds
Life is short, death is long, days are narrow, and years are wide.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Right Now Is the Time to Be Kind You cannot do a kindness too soon for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.
Thiruvalluvar
To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.
Muriel Barbery
Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.
Hélène Cixous
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.
Iris Murdoch
The compassionate person does not require other people to be stupid, in order to be intelligent. Their intelligence is for everyone, so as to have a world in which there is less ignorance. (118)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer
If you cannot create, then buy a company that can. In particular, the large corporations buy small, personnally owned companies that have made breakthroughs in particular areas. They are buying creativity, though the immediate rush this produces doesn't last long. Once integrated into an administrative atmosphere, the creativity is sucked out of them.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
John Ralston Saul
In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.
Søren Kierkegaard
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang-tzu
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.
Plato
If you do not expect it you will not find the unexpected for it is hard to find and difficult.
Heraclitus
Seek to be the smartest in a room, not the loudest.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Wisdom paints a rainbow in your mind, joy paints a rainbow in your heart, and love paints a rainbow in your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Man is only a reed the weakest thing in nature but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal
In a certain sense it might well be said that his was an exemplary life. He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. Without a blush he confessed to dearly loving his nephews and sister, his only surviving near relation, whom he went to France to visit every other year. He admitted that the thought of his parents, whom he lost when he was very young, often gave him a pang. He did not conceal the fact that he had a special affection for a church bell in his part of the town which started pealing very melodiously at about five every afternoon.
Albert Camus
For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.
Robert Musil
Culture with us ends in headache.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted ...but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.
Lao Tzu
Storms pass by on their way to get all the colors needed to paint your rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle
Raise your love so high that anger cannot reach it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The early bird gets the first worm, but the wisest bird gets the fattest one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
With the faith of a child and the wisdom of an old man one can achieve great things.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.
Albert Camus
An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.
G.K. Chesterton
A warrior is defined by his scars, not his medals.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.
Isaiah Berlin