Quotes by Philosophers - Page 303

Morality is like the famous fig leaves that Adam and Eve used to cover their genitals after they first sinned. But what morality really covers up is will, which is our true nature.
Shai Tubali
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt
Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves.
John N Gray
What we should understand here is that it’s not food or breathing that life ultimately needs, but energy. And the most direct expression of energy is heat. In this sense, temperature expresses the essence of life. When you feel the heat in your body, you’re observing the most central operations of your life. You’re connected to the essence of life.
Ilchi Lee
[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
An apple only falls far from its tree when carried away by divine winds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The hotter the furnace the finer the gold.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We Are Interested In Others When They Are Interested In Us
Publilius Syrus
Children are the most reasonable about discipline. When they tell you not to do something, it's always because they know why.
Criss Jami
Traditional education tended to ignore the importance of personal impulse and desire as moving springs. But this is no reason why progressive education should identify impulse and desire with purpose and thereby pass lightly over the need for careful observation, for wide range of information, and for judgment is students are to share in the formation of the purposes which activate them
John Dewey
Satan's despair is absolute because Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair.
Søren Kierkegaard
the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept halfway in order, the public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature. More and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligations within it. This withdrawal from the world need not harm an individual; he may even cultivate great talents to the point of genius and so by a detour be useful to the world again. But with each such retreat an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place; what is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men.
Hannah Arendt
Too much thinking causes confusion and anxietybetter to stick with the simplicity of Tao
Lao Tzu
I will never deny that life isn't fair. It seems as though when a woman leaves a man she is strong and independent, but when a man leaves a woman he is a pig and a jerk.
Criss Jami
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
Dante Alighieri
Time and I against any two.
Baltasar Gracián
What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.
Seneca
The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change.As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.
Stefan Molyneux
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.
Simone Weil
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
The key to the scientist's purpose is the idea that every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of condition. In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions, however complex they may be, which, once they are fully reconstituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after, life. In other words he seeks to start off a mechanically fated chain-reaction; and of course, in enumerating the conditions that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding, methodical research, of himself and others.Thus, by a singular contradiction, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts to persuade others, that he has arrived at the origin of his phenomenon; he sets out to demonstrate that everything in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any creative power at anytime intruding.
Gabriel Marcel
Language is fossil Poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give dry bread to a rich kid and he will throw it into the dustbin, give it to the poor kid and he will remember your name for the rest of his days
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)
Confucius
Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.
Sam Harris
Any pride or haughtiness, is displeasing to us, merely because it shocks our own pride, and leads us by sympathy into comparison, which causes the disagreeable passion of humility.
David Hume
So I am perfectly free to buy any goods that are legally sold throughout Europe, provided that they can be delivered, even though they are not legal in Italy, even because in Italy only stupidity is legal.
Carl William Brown
For an entrepreneur: wealth invites fame. For a celebrity: fame invites wealth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
Henri Bergson
Plucking a rose only proves you desire it, but nurturing it proves you love it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.
Aristotle
Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
G.K. Chesterton
Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits, After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.
Seneca
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton
In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped.
Lao Tzu
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Lao Tzu
Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
Fear is the will's little baby. It arises with the possibility you will lose what you desire.
Shai Tubali
When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
Criss Jami
If you have a really good ideas, one thing you dont need is a fucking gun. An iPad is a kind of a cool thing. They don't need to threaten you with fines to get you to buy one do they? The moment the government says they're gonna force you to do something, you know its a bad idea. If someone invites you on a date with chloroform, an old sofa, and a windowless van, it's not a date.So, the fact that ObamaCare, welfare state, military industrial complex, public schools - you name it. The fact that it has to be imposed at gunpoint is a clue that it's shit. Recognize that when there is a gun to your face, there is not a very advantageous human being on the other end.
Stefan Molyneux
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan Sontag
The removal of God from human consciousness means the removal of meaning and purpose from human life.
Fazlur Rahman
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
Socrates
Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
Dallas Willard
Today is tomorrow’s stepping stone, but for the wise it is a ladder.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A coward: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition and believes he was destined to accept it that way
Bangambiki Habyarimana
So he said, 'What would you like to do? What is your desire really?' I said, 'Doctor, I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.
Allen Ginsberg
Character is that which can do without success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slavery has not been abolished, it has been sanitized
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
Henry David Thoreau
You want to be great? Help others achieve their greatness
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A kiss a day keeps your wife's wrath away.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Divorce fear. Court courage. Pursue hope. Marry love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Guy Debord
There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion.
Criss Jami
Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
John Cage