Quotes by Philosophers - Page 304

Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.
Frédéric Gros
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
Will Durant
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus
Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.
Criss Jami
A genuine smile can speak a thousand words
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument. Forget the years; forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!
Zhuangzi
We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone de Beauvoir
The most beautiful rainbows are sometimes formed in the ugliest storms.
Matshona Dhliwayo
How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil M. Cioran
One who loves roses cannot avoid its thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A promotion is an illusionary solution out of an indebted employee’s pit of debt.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning. They shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.
Søren Kierkegaard
There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.
Simone Weil
You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
At first people ate simply because they were alive and because food was tasty. Modern people have come to think that if they do not prepare food with elaborate seasonings, the meal will be tasteless. If you do not try to make food delicious, you will find that nature has made it so.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Don't wish away your problems. They need action, not wishful thinking
Bangambiki Habyarimana
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
Simone de Beauvoir
More people would be depressed, if parents tried to please their children as frequently and as badly as children try to please their parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A wise man sees as much as he ought not as much as he can.
Michel de Montaigne
If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion. When I have understood that comparison in any form leads only to greater illusion and greater misery, just as when I analyse myself, add to my knowledge of myself bit by bit, or identify myself with something outside myself, whether it be the State, a saviour or an ideology - when I understand that all such processes lead only to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict - when I see all this I put it completely away. Then my mind is no longer seeking. It is very important to understand this. Then my mind is no longer groping, searching, questioning. This does not mean that my mind is satisfied with things as they are, but such a mind has no illusion. Such a mind can then move in a totally different dimension. The dimension in which we usually live, the life of every day which is pain, pleasure and fear, has conditioned the mind, limited the nature of the mind, and when that pain, pleasure and fear have gone (which does not mean that you no longer have joy: joy is something entirely different from pleasure) - then the mind functions in a different dimension in which there is no conflict, no sense of `otherness'.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If you press me to say why I loved him I can say no more than because he was he and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne
Men learn while they teach.
Seneca
Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
What is the use of the colon? What is a colon? Generally it opens onto an explanation, but it is always done with the help of an interruption. It can be said that the colon is not the period, it is the period of the period, the canceling of the period. It is a moment mute and marked; it is the most delicate tattoo of the text. It is also in place of, instead of, everything that would be causal. For example, when we read: "It's simply that: secret." "Secret," is a sentence, it is the shortest sentence perhaps. But it is a sentence in one word. It is a sentence that is secret and that at the same time says its name. One could invert and say: "Secret: it is simply that." This is secret, the secret is the secret of this, it is a word which makes infinite sense all by itself, it is a sentence which performs the secret itself [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]
Hélène Cixous
Action makes more fortunes than caution.
Vauvenargues
The legions who attempt to love without Christ, without a new heart, are indeed able to love amongst themselves; however this love is made possible by restraining any anger or hatred deep within the old heart, only to release it all on whichever village idiot(s) they collectively feel a crucifixion would be justified.
Criss Jami
striid andWthdraw into yourself. Our master-reason asks no more than to act justly, and thereby to achieve calm.
Marcus Aurelius
He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.
Socrates
A buddha lives in the orgasmic state for twenty-four hours, day in and day out. Between the day Gautama Buddha became enlightened and the day he died there is a distance of forty-two years. For these forty-two years he was utterly in an orgasmic state. Just think! Those few moments you have are nothing compared to a Buddha’s.
Osho
Action cannot destroy ignorance, for it is not in conflict with ignorance. Knowledge alone destroys ignorance, as light destroys dense darkness.
Shankara
We’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us.
Cornel West
Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Montesquieu
Love is the soul's rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.
Muriel Barbery
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.
William James
I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.
G.K. Chesterton
God does not take sides. He is always on the side of the winner
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Seeds are proof that God sometimes packages miracles in small things.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Sublime natures are seldom clean!
Longinus
... War is the sole art looked for in one who rules...
Niccolò Machiavelli
The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It must be something voluntary, something self induced - like getting drunk, or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to society. It's unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?
Aldous Huxley
We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Excellent things are rare.
Plato
I have frequently experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I have emerged from it not by any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action.
Bertrand Russell
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Listen to all, believe few, count on some, but trust none.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nice guys finish last but bad guys don't finish at all.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Aristotle
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
G.K. Chesterton
All government - indeed every human benefit and enjoyment every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke
We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm