Quotes by Philosophers - Page 285

It's the most essential thing of all just because it's not a matter of how you do it at all, but of whether you do it. Like being born, or cooking: how you do it is less important than whether you do it. You can find thousands of books on prayer that give you methods of praying, hundreds of "hows"; but they do you no good at all unless you actually pray. Otherwise it's like reading a cookbook instead of cooking. You can't eat a cookbook!
Peter Kreeft
When you are walking on water it is fear, not sharks, that sinks you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Not all who listen, believe. If you call the Gospel a crazy fairy tale, a far-too-good-to-be-true myth, an insane extension of wishful thinking, or even a blasphemous lie, I will respect you and argue with you. But if you call it a platitude, I can only pity you, for that means you have never listened to it.
Peter Kreeft
Good-bye proud world! I'm going home Thou are not my friend I am not thine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the wild beasts have been extinct for years, but it's perfectly possible to synthesize them autobiogenically. On the other hand, why be bound to what was once produced by natural evolution? The spokesman for surrealist zoology was most eloquent - we should populate our preserves with bold, original conceptions, not slavish imitations, we should forge the New, not plagiarize the Old.
Stanisław Lem
I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this
Friedrich Nietzsche
Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.
Bertrand Russell
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Sam Harris
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To the divine providence it has seemed good to prepare in the world to come for the righteous good things, which the unrighteous shall not enjoy; and for the wicked evil things, by which the good shall not be tormented.
Augustine of Hippo
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Henry David Thoreau
There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.
Cicero
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess.
William James
Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.
Simone de Beauvoir
If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there's no logical basis for substance then there's no logical basis for concluding that what's produced these two views is the same motorcycle.
Robert M. Pirsig
Froth at the top dregs at bottom but the middle excellent.
Voltaire
What some politicians really mean when they saythis country: me, my party, my ethnic groupinternational justice is biased: they want to arrest meterrorists: oppositionillegal immigrants: refugeeselections: remaining in powerpeace: eliminating the oppositioninternational community: the rich countriesthe people: sympathisers of my party
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A man who boasts he's the head of the home must never forget the woman is the knife at his throat.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Eternity is today
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
Max Stirner
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
Eric Hoffer
To learn what I know I have burned more midnight oil than you have drunk wine.
Tommaso Campanella
Man was created to glorify God. Now, that may encompass other things which God has planned for each man, but essentially, man was created to glorify God.
Criss Jami
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Dream like a child. Reason like an elder. Play like a youth. Work like an adult.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Breaking through the glass ceiling is only possible if you are stronger than glass.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Hypocrisy is when you get mad at a friend for telling their other friend a secret that your other friend told you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just know that the achievement of anything grand takes consistent effort year after year. Motivation can uphold you intermittently, but it has too few calories to sustain a life.
Chris Matakas
While the Eternal Feminine in Faust II still appears in personalized form as the Madonna, she works her effects in The Magic Flute as an invisible spiritual power, as music. But this music is the expression of divine love itself, which unites law and freedom, above and below, in the wisdom of the heart and of love. As harmony, it grants humankind divine peace and rules the world as the highest divinity.From the earliest times, magic and music have stood under the rule of the Archetypal Feminine, which in myth and fairy tale is also the mistress of transformation, intoxication, and enchanting sound. Thus it is quite understandable that it is precisely this feminine principle that bestows the magical instruments. The Orpheus motif of the magical taming of the animal energies through music belongs to her, for as mistress of the animals the Great Goddess rules the world of wild as well as tame creatures. She can transform things and people into animal form, tame the animal, and enchant it because, like music, she is able to make the tame wild and the wild tame with the power of her magic.
Erich Neumann
Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. 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
The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton
Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.
Isaiah Berlin
The knowledge of the soul is knowledge of the universe
Alexis Karpouzos
Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.
Olaf Stapledon
Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible.
Chris Matakas
God is never angry for His sake, only for ours.
Thomas Aquinas
When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.
Erich Fromm
God speaks of his children shining best in ways that only he can provide. The heavens lift one as a golden child while the flesh lowers one to a child with gold.
Criss Jami
A rose, no matter how beautiful, still has to contend with thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?
Socrates
Words have an immeasurable impact, they can either build or destroy so be careful of your words.
Gift Gugu Mona
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
Lao Tzu
Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?
Gilles Deleuze
Reason is flawless, de jure, but reasoners are not, de facto.
Peter Kreeft
Skill gives you legs to jog, talent gives you legs to run, brilliance gives you legs to sprint, but genius gives you wings to fly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every nation needs more people who love liberty, fear mob rule, and hate tyranny with the consistent logic and passion of Alexis de Tocqueville. He is still quoted by presidential candidates, but too often he’s ignored by presidents, and therein lies the danger. Tocqueville reads beautifully but governs even better.
John Mark Reynolds
When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,—is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Mere parsimony is not economy . . . expense and great expense may be an essential part of true economy.
Edmund Burke
The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his mind
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.
Guy Debord
Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?
Erich Fromm
They said you would fall,but were surprised when you were rising.The said you would fail,but were surprised when you were succeeding.They said you would break,but were surprised when you kept it together.The said you would deteriorate,but were surprised when you were flourishing.
Matshona Dhliwayo