Quotes by Philosophers - Page 347

Courage consists, not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing and conquering it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
How to love is the real question. We all know to love and to keep loving more, but man's confusion comes from the differing opinions on how to love. The Church will always be accused of not loving enough by human standards - which should be its motivation to love more - however that is, in many cases, because its focus is and should also be to love on levels of eternal significance. This is the level of love that will inevitably go unnoticed by those who do not believe in eternity.
Criss Jami
Those who lie and cheat, but do not believe what they are doing to be wrong, may be living according to ethical standards. They may believe, for any of a number of possible reasons, that it is right to lie, cheat, steal and so on. They are not living according to conventional ethical standards, but they may be living according to some other ethical standards.
Peter Singer
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
Susan Sontag
A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
Marcus Aurelius
That absolute, ultimate reality is always there within us (as it is everywhere else, as well). whether we are aware of it or not, it is there, like the sun shining behind the clouds, invisible because of the clouds, but undeniably there. The sun of our inner nature, the LifeParticle Sun, is always shining, whether we see it or not. And because it is already there, we don't need to create or achieve it. We just have to acknowledge it.
Ilchi Lee
The strong overcome several trials.The determined overcome numerous trials.The resilient overcome many trials.The extraordinary overcome countless trials.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste.
Peter Singer
If you do not chase success, you will be overtaken by failure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.
Arthur Schopenhauer
How would this world be if there was not God? The answer is simple: it would become itself God.
Sorin Cerin
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.
Dōgen
In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called ‘astrology.’ But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.
Robert P. Crease
Man is the cruelest animal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All know the way few actually walk it.
Bodhidharma
P46- As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.
Paulo Freire
The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.
Criss Jami
The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them in letters, as in forming their minds and manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse, very early, into the tender and flexible minds of children, such opinions as are both good in themselves and will be useful to their country, for when deep impressions of these things are made at that age, they follow men through the whole course of their lives, and conduce much to preserve the peace of the government, which suffers by nothing more than by vices that rise out of ill opinions.
Thomas More
Millions are impressed by the victories of power and take it for the sign of strength. To be sure, power over people is an expression of superior strength in a purely material sense. If I have the power over another person to kill him, I am "stronger" than he is. But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.
Erich Fromm
...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Immanuel Kant
In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us. We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good
Michel Foucault
Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.
Martin Buber
The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.
Erich Fromm
If there are many thorns in your life, it is because you are a rose.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes but what our purposes are to be.
Norbert Weiner
The experience of this sweet life.
Dante Alighieri
We shall learn the qualities of governments in the same way as we learn the qualities of individuals, since they are revealed in their deliberate acts of choice; and these are determined by the end that inspires them.
Aristotle
It is not every question that deserves an answer.
Syrus
We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
Sam Keen
There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like a man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.
Bertrand Russell
All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing
Edmund Burke
Was there ever something not known before it was recognized?
Sorin Cerin
Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.
John Dewey
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.
Henry David Thoreau
We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over."There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.
G.K. Chesterton
First he wrought and afterwards he taught.
Geoffrey Chaucer
The greatest weight a bird has to drop before it can fly is fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)
Élisabeth Badinter
The relation to the other is not epistemological, but ethical, and the whole attempt to accomodate or account for the other within the confines of my experience already constitutes a breach of this fundamental ethical relation. The other is precisely that which cannot be the object of my experience in the sense of being completely manifest within it, and so cannot be construed as a phenomenon at all.
David R. Cerbone
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.
Henry David Thoreau
Tis a more glorious effect of power to make that holy that was so depraved and under dominion of sin, than to confirm holiness on that which before had nothing of the contrary.
Jonathan Edwards
[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
Mark Fisher
When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written; then the standard of the just or the unjust, which is to be the norm of conduct for the ignorant as well as for the philosophic citizen, is not a matter of controversy but of fact; then only are citizens not subject to the petty tyrannies of the many which are the more cruel as the distance between the oppressed and the oppressor is less, and which are far more fatal than those of a single man, for the despotism of many can only be corrected by the despotism of one; the cruelty of a single despot is proportioned, not to his might, but to the obstacles he encounters.
Cesare Beccaria
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If I am unhappy, it has been of my own making, and that very thing shows that I can be happy if I will.
Swami Vivekananda
When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.
D.T. Suzuki
When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau
In an age of constant live connections, the central question of self-examination is drifting from ‘Who are you?’ towards ‘What are you doing?
Tom Chatfield
Teach yourself. Help yourself. Improve yourself. Enrich yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No matter how kind you are, always expect a few imbeciles.
Criss Jami
Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.
Rudolf Steiner
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
Will Durant
Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Eugen Herrigel
To be simple is the best thing in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.
Augustine of Hippo