Quotes by Philosophers - Page 314

If we do not master ourselves, we will be a slave to ourselves.
Chris Matakas
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner, if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation-- those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
J.S. Mill
A golden opportunity may turn into silver if you wait too long to take advantage of it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.
Sri Aurobindo
He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.
Baltasar Gracián
Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.
Nick Bostrom
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
Friedrich Nietzsche
…every feeling is the perception of a truth...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
It is in vain to try and stop a star from rising, even with a ladder.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.
Dante Alighieri
Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.
Erich Fromm
It's useless to disarm the hands, if the heart remains armed
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Just as the hand rushes involuntarily to protect one's honor in case of accidental state of undress, so does a friend come to his friend's aid without being asked
Thiruvalluvar
If [a man] spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.
Bertrand Russell
The love of Christ is always there and unchanging, no matter what we do, but it is when we are obedient that we actually begin to feel it.
Criss Jami
Even Diotima and Amheim were shy of using it without a modifier, for it is still possible to speak of having a great, noble, craven, daring, or debased soul, but to come right out with "my soul" is something one simply cannot bring oneself to do. It is distinctly anolder person's word, and this can only be understood by assuming that in the course of life people become more and more aware of something for which they urgently need a name they cannot find until they finally resort, reluctantly, to the name they had originally despised. How to describe it, then? Whether one is at rest or in motion, what matters is not what lies ahead, what one sees, hears, wants, takes, masters. It forms a horizon, a semicircle before one, but the ends of this semicircle are joined by a string, and the plane of this string goes right through·the middle of the world. In front, the face and hands look out of it; sensations and strivings run ahead of it, and no one doubts that whatever one does·is always reasonable, or at least passionate. In other words, outercircumstances call for us to act in a way everyone can understand; and if, in the toils of passion, we do something incomprehensible, that too is, in its own way, understandable.
Robert Musil
But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let me make this radiantly clear—if you believe in spirits and the metaphysical world, your biology will create the illusion that these things are real.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.
Criss Jami
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
Epictetus
Your greatest acts result from your greatest love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We want people to represent us in politics—and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it—or considering it—aesthetics is there.
Eli Siegel
That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.
Aldous Huxley
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If people are not dancing to your tune, change the song.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.
G.K. Chesterton
All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.
Will Durant
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
George Santayana
To be simple is to be great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We can only learn to love by loving.
Iris Murdoch
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
Hélène Cixous
If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.
Slavoj Žižek
Is the sunrise superior just because it goes before the sunset with a day and sunset goes before the sunrise with a night? Could there be day without night and sunrise without sunset, life without death?
Sorin Cerin
We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor.
Hélène Cixous
you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings ofHecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That wasindeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.
Seneca
A maid’s yard, house, wardrobe, fridge, etc. sometimes also serve as her master’s dustbin or dumpsite.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.
Karl Marx
That man who is without religion and mercy should be rejected. A guru without spiritual knowledge should be rejected. The wife with an offensive face should be given up and so should relatives who are without affection.
Chanakya
The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.
Immanuel Kant
Great thoughts always come from the heart.
Vauvenargues
As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you strive for excellence in leadership, then you will excel as a leader.
Gift Gugu Mona
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion...
Søren Kierkegaard
He who makes $25,000 annually through passive income is more enviable than he who earns $100,000 annually through a salary.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.
G.K. Chesterton
Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.
Epicurus
To seek contentment is to release the novelty that lies within monotony
Ilyas Kassam
always keep your mind joyful; if melancholy thoughts come, kick them out.
Swami Vivekananda
Planting your own garden is better than waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Life is a mystery, not a riddle. It has to be lived, not solved.
Osho
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau
When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself
Lao Tzu
Turbulence breaks a tree’s branches, but only tickles an eagle’s wings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.
Criss Jami