Quotes by Philosophers - Page 32

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
G.K. Chesterton
A true prophet would rather be believed false by many but actually true than believed true by many but actually false.
Criss Jami
That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.
Walter Benjamin
Those who say that money can’t buy you love make it sound as if love can buy you money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also it demands psychological energy. By the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict. So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you can proceed tearing the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all. You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system, - this comes about daily – but the psychological, the unconscious and the rationally, individually, deeply and superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority, and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity; no authority that function assumes and which becomes status. To understand all authority – of the gurus, of the Masters, and others – requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Employment was invented to make education seem useful.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Prosperity makes some friends and many enemies.
Vauvenargues
There is no sharper spear than wisdom.There is no larger shield than faith.There is no better fortress than truth.There is no greater strength than hope.There is no higher power than love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".
U.G. Krishnamurti
Eternity is a long time, but only a day when you are in love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.
Stefan Molyneux
If we can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it because the answer is not separate from the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came.
Umberto Eco
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke
When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.
Criss Jami
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
William James
Most human beings strongly believe that money is way less important than the life of a human being, but in reality five hundred, fifty, or even five dollars are way more important to the lives of most human beings than the lives of most human beings.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every human activity can be put at the service of the divine and of love. We should all exercise our gift to build community.
Jean Vanier
Think outside of the box. Work outside of the box. Dream outside of the box. Succeed outside of the box.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.
Francis Bacon
He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
Edmund Burke
When disinformation is running rampant, there are two ignorances that may emerge: the one is actually positive, a sort of pure and intentional emptying of the mind; but the other is of course negative and clogged and polluted.
Criss Jami
One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
Simone de Beauvoir
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
If you step on a serpent, it will reply you with its fangs.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Jean Baudrillard
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer
I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.
Ayn Rand
When people see some things as beautiful,other things become ugly.When people see some things as good,other things become bad.
Lao Tzu
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer
You are not required to perform like them, you are required to perform like you.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
People belittle or ignore or even rebel against God, because they view theprocesses of nature as having self-sufficient causes, normally regarded by them asultimate. They do not realize that the universe is a sign pointing to something"beyond" itself, something without which the universe, with all its natural causes,would be and could be nothing.
Fazlur Rahman
The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it.
Epicurus
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
Sam Harris
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape a fire is guilty of suicide?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thinking is itself, however, an adventure.
James V. Schall
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
Simone de Beauvoir
Even subjects that are known are known only to a few
Aristotle
The second most dangerous thing about money is that it leaves most of the people who have a lot of it with the unshakable belief that they are intelligent and well informed. The most dangerous thing about it is that it leaves most of the people who do not have a lot of money with the very same belief.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing feels dirtier than living a life that is not your own. No amount of money is worth my soul. I would rather be homeless and go out in a blaze of glory than subject myself to a slow and steady death of apathy and government by my environment.
Chris Matakas
Governments represent their citizens in the same way as parasites represent their hosts.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Russell observes that "the merits of democracy are negative: it does not ensure good government, but it prevents certain evils," such as the evil of a small group of individuals achieving a secure monopoly on political power. The chief peril for the politician, Russell insists, is love of power. And politicians can easily yield to the love of power on the pretense that they are pursuing some absolute good.
Bertrand Russell
Far help seldom solves near troubles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The cleanest feet in the universe are positive thoughts walking through your mind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.
Democritus
Night brings our troubles to the light rather than banishes them.
Seneca
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty justice and happiness which is everything in this world.
Pascal
The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.
Confucius
[This philosophy] does not … regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot
Ludwig Feuerbach
As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.
Peter Sloterdijk