Quotes by Philosophers - Page 34

. . . if you close your eyes and begin to feel your breath, it will instantly become deeper and slower, and your mind will become calmer. Then gradually you'll become aware of your body, or more precisely the subtle sense of energy inside and around your body. At that moment, you exist as Energy-Consciousness, not as names, jobs, duties, roles, desires, and so on.
Ilchi Lee
distringit librorum multitudo (the abundance of books is distraction)
Seneca
On the whole the modern world has been conditioned to have a chip on its shoulder against devoutly religious people. I disagree with this in some instances - particularly in, believe it or not, matters of integrity. Deep down I often rather believe the man who honestly thinks - or better yet even, prefers - that he has an omnipotent Judge breathing down his neck, holding his every word and his every move accountable, than the man who much like his modern peers, and ironically enough, claims or wishes to bask in complete independence. As it appears actually, the former is more free of guilt than the latter.
Criss Jami
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.
Friedrich Schiller
That one has to be playing in order to be playing a game seems equally implausible. When professional athletes are performing in assigned games for wages, although they are certainly playing games, we are not at all inclined to conclude from that fact that they are without qualification playing. For we think of professional athletes as working when they play their games and as playing when they go home from work to romp with their children.
Bernard Suits
... From want of foresight men make changes which relishing well at first do not betray their hidden venom, as I have already observed respecting hectic fever. Nevertheless, the ruler is not truly wise who cannot discern evils before they develop themselves, and this is a faculty given to few.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Poverty, like obesity, has the tendency to add at least ten years to the appearance of its victims, especially those who are over the age of twenty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so;
Simone de Beauvoir
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For there are two reasons why human beings face danger calmly: they may have no experience of it, or they may have means to deal with it: thus when in danger at sea people may feel confident about what will happen either because they have no experience of bad weather, or because their experience gives them the means of dealing with it.
Aristotle
It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.
Seneca
The skeptic says that the believer has lost his own mind under God. On the contrary, it is the people who follow God who are most like his children, who willingly and consciously walk in his will; but those who oppose him oppose him vainly and at their own expense, and, figuratively, seem to be more like his tools. They don't diminish his glory, but instead he still manages to use them in ways of unconsciously carrying out his will.
Criss Jami
The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.
Will Durant
If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.
Criss Jami
You are as free as a prisoner in an open air prison
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
Henry David Thoreau
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar it never fails of doing justice upon itself for every guilty person is his own hangman.
Seneca
God sometimes uses ugly vessels to carry beautiful things.
Matshona Dhliwayo
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be
A.C. Grayling
Had I not gone through my past struggles, I wouldn't be as strong as I am at present.
Gift Gugu Mona
I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Justice is useful when money is useless.
Plato
It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.
Criss Jami
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.
Ayn Rand
Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.
Blaise Pascal
There is no greater beast than envy, no greater thief than fear, no greater enemy than greed, no greater predator than wrath, and no greater poison than bitterness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order method and discipline.
Michel de Montaigne
Noble leaders choose: wisdom over wealth, knowledge over fame, understanding over honor, virtue over titles, and people over power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority 'You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.' Well, I gave a thorough examination to this person... and in conversation with him I formed the impression that although in many people's opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to try to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the other people present. However, I reflected as I walked away: 'Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know... [A]s I pursued my investigation at the god's command,... my honest impression was... that the people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient, while others who were supposed to be their inferiors were much better qualified in practical intelligence.
Socrates
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Although it's great to appear to a feast, home is always sweet, though it may be lonely and cold like death
Bangambiki Habyarimana
She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
Ayn Rand
You are not a real thinker if your thoughts haven't landed you in trouble yet
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Pascal
The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.
René Girard
What I'm sure of," he began, "is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me. Very specific. Very clear."(...)"Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness. But that's not the question. To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.
Albert Camus
Your Mercy is my social status.
Guru Nanak
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.
Lao Tzu
Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde
Dante Alighieri
The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Every day, strive to refine your contagious shine, and shake the nonsense offered by those who lack the will to polish-up from within.
T.F. Hodge
A rainbow is a storm's masterpiece.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.
Thomas Metzinger
Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.
Aldous Huxley
We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
These are the times that try men's souls.
Thomas Paine
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A.
Ayn Rand
Try to live the life of the good man who is more than content with what is allocated to him.
Marcus Aurelius
One who cannot dance must not blame the song.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.
Albert Camus
Any day stands equal to the rest.
Heraclitus
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Albert Camus
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know - for comedians are the caricatures among us.
Criss Jami
When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.
J. G. Hamann