Quotes by Philosophers - Page 316

The great are strongest when they stand alone,A God-given might of being is their force.
Sri Aurobindo
What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Consider a man’s good qualities, and consider his faults; and judge his character by that which is more.
Thiruvalluvar
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
Ayn Rand
When life is sweet, be thankful, and rejoice; but when bitter, be strong, and persevere.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.
Charles Eisenstein
If you would wish another to keep your secret first keep it yourself.
Seneca
It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.
Blaise Pascal
Every seed must rise through dirt to enjoy the sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.
Friedrich Schiller
The particular creature we love is never God’s rival. What ends in apostasy is the worship of man, the cult of humanity.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
If money could buy happiness, the rich would not drown their sorrows in expensive wine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Where neither go wrong, the naive only see the world as a victim of bad doctrine; the cynic only sees good doctrine as a victim of the world.
Criss Jami
Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.
Richard M. Weaver
No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.
Peter Slezak
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you the society of your contemporaries the connection of events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.
Peter Kreeft
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Iris Murdoch
Clarity is like casting light. Clarity allows us to see better and eases the path of understanding. And just as one light source need not deny the illumination of another but can add to it, the understanding gained through one explanation can stand to gain from another, even if it is different in approach. The truth is more exclusive...
Cyrus Panjvani
Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.
Elbert Hubbard
Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.
Nicola Abbagnano
The ritual denunciation of the so-called ‘socialist’ states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.
Noam Chomsky
If you try to buy love, you will go bankrupt trying to possess it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's "uses base" for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler.
Plato
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
Aristotle
Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done. No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them.
Plato
A star is not afraid of darkness, for its light comes from within.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.
Karl Marx
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
Through understanding comes control. Through ignorance one goes on forcing and suppressing. Always do everything with understanding, and you never harm yourself or anybody else.
Osho
In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.
Ivan Illich
You have not lost if you have learned one new lesson.You have not lost if you have helped one new person.You have not lost if you have overcome one new obstacle.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the "world well lost." Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe.
G.K. Chesterton
When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
Ayn Rand
A paedophile is someone whose sexual attraction towards children their own age did not grow with them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.
G.K. Chesterton
One idea lights a thousand candles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage consists of the power of self-recovery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you still have fear, you love life
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
G.K. Chesterton
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.
Alan W. Watts
In love with myself, that is what people say I am. It doesn’t surprise me, for how could they notice that I can love when I love only you; how could anyone else suspect it when I love only you? In love with myself. Why? Because I’m in love with you, because it is you I love, you alone, and all that truly belongs to you, and it is thus I love myself, because this, my self, belongs to you, so that if I ceased loving you I would cease loving myself. What then is, in the eyes of the profane world, an expression of the greatest egoism, is for your initiated eyes the expression of purest sympathy; what in the profane eyes of the world is an expression of the most prosaic self-preservation, is for your sacred sight the expression of the most enthusiastic self-annihilation.”―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_
Søren Kierkegaard
I wish to say what I think and feel today with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Super-Integral Spirituality has all the features of an Integral Spirituality, plus, among other things, an inherent conjunction of each stage with a given state, giving all of its stages a transpersonal or spiritual flavor (at least the possibility of either gross nature mysticism, subtle deity mysticism, causal formless mysticism, or nondual Unity mysticism). These mystical states are, of course, available to virtually all the lower 1st- and 2nd-tier stages, although there are likely some significant differences in 3rd tier, given its inherent conjunction of structures and states.
Ken Wilber
If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.
G.K. Chesterton
Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.
G.K. Chesterton
That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:
Augustine of Hippo
The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: “We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Where did the somewhat awkward “pursuit of happiness” come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property— the latter was replaced by “the pursuit of happiness” during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves’ right to property.
Slavoj Žižek
A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Umberto Eco
Learn from acquaintances, and you are clever; from friends, and you are intelligent; from enemies, and you are shrewd; but learn from all, and you are wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The supreme truth is that nothing ever is born.
Gaudapada
However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
Aldous Huxley
Socrates indeed when he was asked of what country he called himself said "Of the world" for he considered himself an inhabitant and a citizen of the whole world.
Cicero
Men are punished by their sins, not for them.
Elbert Hubbard
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.
Thomas Carlyle