Quotes by Philosophers - Page 320

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Marshall McLuhan
Be like seeds; do not see dirt thrown at you as your enemy, but as ground to grow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
G.K. Chesterton
Satan fell by the force of gravity.
G.K. Chesterton
Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so. Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris
René Descartes
you need power only to do something harmful.otherwise love is enough,compassion is enough.
Osho
So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.
Cornelius Van Til
To create something does not mean to see through to its depths; we do not drain our children to the dregs by begetting them, but set them loose in the world like wild dogs, beyond our control and often beyond our knowledge.
Graham Harman
Zen is the purest of meditations: just sit silently, doing nothing.
Osho
It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
Pyotr Kropotkin
The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt.
Élisabeth Badinter
If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
John O'Donohue
Believe me if you consult philosophy she will persuade you not to lit so long at your counting desk
Seneca
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
Noam Chomsky
The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.
G.K. Chesterton
Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.
Jacques Ellul
There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man is tolerant because he was given the flag of peace, another because he is cowardly and wishes to hide all guilt.
Criss Jami
Learn to ... be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Divorce is not always a doorway to happiness. The same can be said about marriage.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.
A.J. Ayer
We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care.
Alain de Botton
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
Ayn Rand
A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.
Criss Jami
The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.
Bertrand Russell
The blind can see love, the deaf can hear love, the mute can express love, and the disabled can carry love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.
A.C. Grayling
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
René Descartes
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Thomas Aquinas
True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... To find one real friend in a lifetime is a good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.
Baltasar Gracián
They say in Zen, waking up to life requires three things: great faith, great doubt, and great effort. Faith isn’t a way of going to sleep. It’s the work of waking up. And, in order to wake up, you’ll need both great faith and great doubt. In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it. You can doubt what’s real in order to stay asleep or you can doubt your daydreams in order to wake up. You can use doubt to protect you from the truth or you can use doubt to leave you vulnerable to it. You’ll have doubts regardless. Repurpose them for the sake of faith. Saving doubt is a strong solvent that can burn holes in your [worldview] and lead you back to the work of being faithful to life and, thus, to God. Practicing doubt for the sake of faith is hard work and it demands great effort. Great faith, great doubt, great effort.
Adam S. Miller
A smile is a friend maker
Bangambiki Habyarimana
An individual dies ... when instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being he cowers within and takes refuge there.
E. M. Cioran
The worship of power is an old religion.
George Santayana
The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longer stand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison, so that my release brings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prison life, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and indulge all the time in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when, eventually, I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.
Slavoj Žižek
The noble-minded encourage what is beautiful in people and discourage what is ugly in them. Little people do just the opposite.
Confucius
The world sees you for what you are, but the universe sees you for what you can be.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ask a toad what is beauty? ... a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head a large flat mouth a yellow belly and a brown back.
Voltaire
You cannot build a dream on a foundation of sand. To weather the test of storms, it must be cemented in the heart with uncompromising conviction.
T.F. Hodge
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
Albert Camus
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Robert M. Pirsig
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
One swallow does not make a summer,neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
Aristotle
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
What mancan you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he isdying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.
Seneca
Behind you, leave your enemies. Beside you, keep your family. Around you, maintain your friends. Within you, cherish God.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be ashamed not of being single, or, unemployed. That comes standard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Who hasn't got the seeds of evil in him?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.
Ayn Rand
In the midst of darkness, he alone sees the dawn; in the midst of the soundless, he alone hears harmony.
Zhuangzi
In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.
Paulo Freire
We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.
John Dewey
Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs.In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.
Antony Flew
What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?
Aldous Huxley
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
L. P. Jacks
Memory: Recognizing the value of an alert mind and an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently.
Bruce Lee
Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.
Michel de Montaigne
The easiest way to remember your future wife’s birthday is to marry her on Super Bowl Sunday.
Matshona Dhliwayo
People will seek the ends of the galaxy to avoid that which they need most.
Criss Jami
That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.
Matthew Tindal