Quotes by Philosophers - Page 31

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Søren Kierkegaard
I firmly believe that life will continually try to teach you the same lesson, with increasing pain, until you heed the call.
Chris Matakas
The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.
Elbert Hubbard
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something-always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring.
Bodhidharma
Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
William James
In short, you had that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
There is nothing so bitter that a patient mind cannot find some solace for it.
Seneca
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
Sam Harris
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
Seneca
Man is an end in himself.
Ayn Rand
We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
Michel de Montaigne
The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...
Henri Bergson
When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the bright joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that the blessing of friendship was to help each other out of a financial tight spot, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined 10 rix-dollars, that cordiality was to say ‘You’re welcome’ after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw. And I laughed.
Søren Kierkegaard
Do not surrender your dreams based on the seasonality, chase them until they become a reality.
Gift Gugu Mona
The world seems to be witnessing a deluge of 'haterisms', and racist propaganda because evil's pain was born to die, and it's time of tyranny is near the end. Don't get caught up by the souls of wickedness; this ain't your fight. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions.
Vauvenargues
To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.
Christos Yannaras
It takes more than one individual to make a team.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle
Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive.Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy.
John Stuart Mill
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
They sicken of the calm that know the storm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have a thing for things that last.
Criss Jami
Wisdom does not make me full. It fills me with hunger.
Noah Benshea
If the only prayer you say in your whole life is "Thank you " that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart
Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.
Jonathan Glover
A makeover is the rebranding of a human being.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one's absence. And indeed I couldn't deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole - especially when returning from a long voyage - to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.
Stanisław Lem
But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
Bodhidharma
God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.
John C. Lennox
If you don’t stand sincere by your wordshow sincere can the people be?Take great care over words, treasure them.1.17
Lao Tzu
It is true that a great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them. But it is a great mistake to suppose that he will do this better for being ignorant of the traditions.
John Stuart Mill
Be like water; soft as it is, it breaks through rocks and impenetrable surfaces.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.
Martin Heidegger
He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much the master of the world as he who is ready to die.
Giacomo Leopardi
Dream the impossible.See the invisible.Pursue the intangible.Achieve the incredible.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
Marcus Aurelius
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin
It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.
Thomas More
Any seed that is planted by God bears fruit even before it touches the ground.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means and so make for themselves different modes of life.
Aristotle
It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
Henry David Thoreau
The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire... "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.
Josef Pieper
False humility is quite like the worst of both worlds: both that of Meekness and that of Conceit.
Criss Jami
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love. Who can deny? In dreams it touches the body, in thought constructs a miracle, in imagination anguishes till born in human-- looks out of the heart burning with purity-- for the burden of life is love, but we carry the weight wearily, and so must rest in the arms of love at last, must rest in the arms of love. No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love-- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love --cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy --must give for no return as thought is given in solitude in all the excellence of its excess. The warm bodies shine together in the darkness, the hand moves to the center of the flesh, the skin trembles in happiness and the soul comes joyful to the eye-- yes, yes, that's what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born.
Allen Ginsberg
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Immanuel Kant
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A model’s opinion seldom matters. The only time that he is required to open his mouth is when he is required to smile at the camera.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the Persians used to consult about their mostimportant affairs after being well warmed with wine.
Michel de Montaigne