Quotes by Philosophers - Page 332

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
Hannah Arendt
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Ayn Rand
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.
Seneca
Change is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Bertrand Russell
If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy
Boethius
The amount of understanding produced by a theory is determined by how well it meets the criteria of adequacy–testability, fruitfulness, scope, simplicity, conservatism–because these criteria indicate the extent to which a theory systematizes and unifies our knowledge.
Theodore Schick Jr.
I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Not everyone who condemns masturbation can masturbate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
... If instead of colonies you send troops, the cost is vastly greater, and the whole revenues of the country are spent in guarding it so that the gain becomes a loss, and much deeper offense is given since in shifting the quarters of your soldiers from place to place the whole country suffers hardship, which as all feel, all are made enemies and enemies who remaining, although vanquished, in their own homes, have power to hurt. In every way, therefore, this mode of defense is as disadvantageous as that by colonizing is useful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.
Voltaire
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
To fill the hour──that is happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
Ayn Rand
Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…
Bangambiki Habyarimana
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
John Stuart Mill
Better for them to deny the mind--and with it rationality, truth, and science itself--than to admit the soul. Once again, the secularist manifests the very dogmatism of which he accuses the religious believer, and in rationalizing it is willing to contemplate absurdities of which no religious believer has ever dreamed.
Edward Feser
The talk of sin is of course to many a big turn-off; to others, an even bigger myth - because in reality, sin is like the spiritual equivalent of a microscopic parasite, or a virus, or better yet even, an infectious disease. And just as one might never know of, until visiting a competent doctor, the tiny pathogens progressively eroding one's body, so we might never know that in sin we are eroding our being and losing direction until hearing the Word of God rightfully applied. Therefore I ask, which of the doctors would then be the more competent: the one who finds the problem and gives the solution, or the one who willfully ignores the problem (or rather finds the problem when it is much too late)? Seldom does anyone write off the knowledge of medicine for the physical body as primitive practice, so neither must the knowledge of the Word of God for one's spiritual well-being remain written off as primitive practice - quite the opposite really. As it is written thus: 'Lean not on your own understanding.
Criss Jami
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
G.K. Chesterton
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Ayn Rand
An apple never bares a pear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.
Marcus Aurelius
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
G.K. Chesterton
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
Iris Murdoch
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
Henry David Thoreau
Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage lightens distress, hope alleviates grief, doubt aggravates affliction, fear worsens anguish, worry magnifies misery, and faith overthrows despair.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Jean-Paul Sartre
These days, though, tolerance means that you accept the other person's views as being true or legitimate. If you claim that someone is wrong, you can get accused of being intolerant--even though, ironically, the person making the charge of intolerance isn't being accepting of your beliefs.
Paul Copan
Everything flows nothing stays still.
Heraclitus
Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope the same without such opinion despair.
Thomas Hobbes
The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
Slavoj Žižek
Dangers by being despised grow great.
Edmund Burke
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
Amos Bronson Alcott
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.
Aldous Huxley
To pursue wisdom is to live in such a way that one is prepared to face death when it comes. (247)
Gregory Bassham
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
Richard M. Rorty
The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves - which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attributes of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God - that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking - as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away.
Clare Carlisle
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
An educated woman is seen as a human being with a vagina. An uneducated woman is seen as a vagina with a human being.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The earth laughs in flowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is free rather than man is freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Never declare Fate your enemy; she does not take lightly declarations of war. Declare your friendship to her instead, and smile in hope of better days.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able vicariously to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat what's more with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley
Sages shine so they can see the world, not so the world can see them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.
Walter Benjamin
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
John Stuart Mill
Love, and you shall be loved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.
Jean-Paul Sartre
good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws
Plato
It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...
Emil M. Cioran
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.
Karl Marx
If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity . . . My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again - for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Not every person that speaks less than you do is more ignorant than you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only reason that some people aren’t ashamed of their parents and/or siblings is because they know that we know that they did not choose them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana