Quotes by Philosophers - Page 345

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.
Vauvenargues
Pride ... is the direct appreciation of oneself.
Arthur Schopenhauer
But just a vibration among the trees and stones, on the paths. Walking to breathe in the landscape. Every step an inspiration born to die immediately, well beyond the oeuvre. I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste.
Frédéric Gros
Of course, Kafka doesn't see himself as a sort of party. He doesn't even pretend to be revolutionary, whatever his socialist sympathies may be. He knows that all the lines link him to a literary machine of expression for which he is simultaneously the gears, the mechanic, the operator, and the victim. So how will he proceed in this bachelor machine that doesn't make use of, and can't make use of, social critique? How will he make a revolution?He will act on the German language such as it is in Czechoslovakia. Since it is a deterritorialized language in many ways, he will push the deterritorialization farther, not through intensities, reversals and thickenings of the language but through a sobriety that makes language take flight on a straight line, anticipates or produces its segmentations. Expression must sweep up content; the same process must happen to form... It is not a politics of pessimism, nor a literary caricature or a form of science fiction.
Giles Deleuze
One who cannot swim must not blame the water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Plato
We revolutionary anarchists are the enemies of all forms of State and State organisations ... wethink that all State rule, all governments being by their very nature placed outside the mass of thepeople, must necessarily seek to subject it to customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. Wetherefore declare ourselves to be foes ... of all State organisations as such, and believe that thepeople can only be happy and free, when, organised from below by means of its own autonomousand completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its ownlife.
Mikhail Bakunin
Don't lose faith in humanity: think of all the people in the United States who have never played you a single nasty trick.
Elbert Hubbard
mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.
Voltaire
Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious
Ayn Rand
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task oftmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around.
Criss Jami
Raising donkeys in the midst of horses will not make them sprinters.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.
David Pearce
Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.
Henry David Thoreau
It is fellowship, this most fundamental need on our way toward achieving our highest expression of the human experience, which Jiu Jitsu provides.
Chris Matakas
Spurious fame spreads from tongue to tongue like the fog of the early dawn before the sun rises.
Rabindranath Tagore
We influence others most profoundly when we do not seek to change them at all, but simply go about straightforwardly doing the right and loving thing.
C. Terry Warner
He is much to be dreaded who stands in dread of poverty.
Publilius Syrus
I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
Olaf Stapledon
We all have problems. Or rather, everyone has at least one thing that they regard as a problem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Conflict is the essence of the self.
J.Krishnamurti
There is a charm in saying nothing, in saying nothing at all. There is a charm in - experiencing.
Peter Cave
I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
Zhuangzi
If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner and hear what he had to say and make fun of him.
Thomas Carlyle
A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.
Ayn Rand
All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Upon examination of a people’s history, beware the story teller’s motives.
T.F. Hodge
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.
Susan Sontag
I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength
Friedrich Nietzsche
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Albert Camus
Well begun is half done.
Horace
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
Success is not greedy as people think but insignificant. That's why it satisfies nobody.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture…
Arthur Schopenhauer
Your mind is your world.Your heart is your nature.Your soul is your universe.Your life is your creation.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Bertrand Russell
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton
By attuning your breathing, you can become one with the natural rhythm of life that flows through you all the time.
Ilchi Lee
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We should all have the freedom to die with majesty in an unworthy life which was subjected to sin and vanity.
Sorin Cerin
No morality can be founded on authority even if the authority were divine.
A.J. Ayer
Those who think fate is against them have already crucified themselves. They have already decided what fate should do with them
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius
An afro is a poor man’s haircut.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
Alan W. Watts
Time crumbles things everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
Aristotle
Autopilot is great, and removal of thought is one of the highest ideals of training. But removal of thought in the moment must be preceded by purposeful thought beforehand.
Chris Matakas
Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Ayn Rand
The fewer our wants the nearer we resemble the gods.
Socrates
Crawl in faith, and you will end up walking.Walk in faith, and you will end up jogging.Jog in faith, and you will end up running.Run in faith, and you will end up sprinting.Sprint in faith, and you will end up soaring.
Matshona Dhliwayo
While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.
Richard Kearney
Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke