Quotes by Philosophers - Page 286

A cowardly critique starts with a compliment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.
Albert Schweitzer
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.
Immanuel Kant
The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'.
Michel Foucault
[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.
Alain de Botton
...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
Umberto Eco
We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
Alain de Botton
we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood
William James
[Hegel’s] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy….Hegel…launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane.
Hermann von Helmholtz
The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more commonly so, detested for disturbing the daily peace of mind.
Criss Jami
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant
I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed
Criss Jami
Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
Blaise Pascal
For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and ofother selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of thecategories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant.
Aldous Huxley
If an opportunity comes dressed in trouble’s apparel, do not scorn it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You think you're losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it's not all gone.
Criss Jami
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
Love is ill-mannered; it can knock on your heart early, stay late, and leave without saying goodbye.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most successful men work smart, not hard
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In calm waters you still find sharks.
Matshona Dhliwayo
But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?-an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value.
Ayn Rand
To question reason is to trust it.
Mitch Stokes
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.
Henry Maudsley
Excellence annoys your haters, success infuriates them, and genius kills them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. –Aristotle
Aristotle
The path towards peace is not for the righteous, the ethical, the active and the compassionate to shit on the malicious, the complacent, the violent and the ignorant. The path towards peace is to be peaceful.
Ilyas Kassam
Better know nothing than half-know many things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.
Plato
Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
Seneca
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
Voltaire
Not the measure of words is necessary, but their meaning.
Sorin Cerin
I am not a ‘wise man,’ nor . . . shall I ever be. And so require not from me that I should be equal to the best, but that I should be better than the wicked. It is enough for me if every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.
Seneca
Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.
Ayn Rand
Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
High justice would in no way be debased if ardent love should cancel instantly the debts these penitents must satisfy.
Dante Alighieri
It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.
Aldous Huxley
People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.
Mary Midgley
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Michel de Montaigne
love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
Confucius
The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
Henry David Thoreau
Anyone can write a holy book, if he feels god is calling him to do so
Bangambiki Habyarimana
He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
Friedrich von Schiller
Starving whilst schooled is like a man’s finding out that his wife is on her periods … a few seconds after he took Viagra.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No one can be alone when he befriends with the forgotten stranger inside him.
Sorin Cerin
a man only knows what he's experienced
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore though they should fall immediately they had better aim at something high.
Henry David Thoreau
With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing perfection... This atomization of the law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless 'juridization' of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of daily life... With it we enter into the hell of guilt, such as St. Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source of sin.
Paul Ricœur
People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel Foucault
Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.
John D. Caputo
Fools do not acknowledge God,the proud reject Him,the wise embrace Him,and the righteous worship Him.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.
Criss Jami
Napoleon the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself.
Otto Weininger
Peace gives you the world, laughter gives you the sky, joy gives you the world, and love gives you the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.
Arthur Schopenhauer