Quotes by Philosophers - Page 350

Because it is so unbelievable, the truth often escapes being known.
Heraclitus
The great man is he that does not lose his child-heart.
Mencius
A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.
Voltaire
All passions exaggerate it is because they do that they are passions.
Nicolas de Chamfort
All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
Thomas Carlyle
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
We Americans pride ourselves on our freedom to speak, to say what we believe. But of what use is it to speak if only those who already agree with us listen? A first step toward the abolition of war is learning to listen with respect and sympathy.
Nel Noddings
Hear more than people say.Give more than people ask.Do more than people expect.Achieve more than people imagine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A feeble body weakens the mind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.
Cicero
With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent—and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait.
Søren Kierkegaard
*Nothing is free* asserts two things. Both assertions are true.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke
Don't downgrade your dreams to upgrade your relationships.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
Gilles Deleuze
To the militant, identity is everything.
Susan Sontag
People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.
Sam Harris
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
Criss Jami
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
When a woman wants your attention, she uses her smile. When she wants your wallet, she uses her charm. When she wants your heart, she uses her touch. When she wants your soul, she uses her kiss.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won’t have to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries – the chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.... If you could pass through it without losing your consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, ”whatever misery I have created, I’ll go through it, I’ll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered any misery – I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain, or sorrow.
Osho
On ne peut opposer absraitement le spectacle et l'activité sociale effective.
Guy Debord
Eagles fly alone, not because they are proud, but because they are not afraid of soaring above the clouds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.
Thomas Paine
It's not that success is guaranteed that we go to war. It's because it is the only alternative we have left to avoid annihilation
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
Iris Murdoch
Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Grass is food for elephants, but a cushion for lions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.
Henri Bergson
To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.
David Hume
If you have power, be just; wealth, be generous; knowledge, be wise; titles, be humble; and life, be grateful.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Thanksgiving comes after Christmas.
Peter Kreeft
His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room.
Rabindranath Tagore
Daisies that bring you joy are better than roses that bring you sorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
This was the penn'worth of his thought.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it--as proof, as sanction, as reward--into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary.
Ayn Rand
Being a 'good' parent is more about the parent, and, less about the 'supposedly-could-have-been-bad' child.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.
Umberto Eco
If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleve
Elbert Hubbard
If you have a spark of genius, kindle it until it becomes a flame.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The Spirit Tower has its guardian, but unless it understands who its guardian is, it cannot be guarded.
Zhuangzi
I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I began to see that while equality often entailed women crossing the sexual divide between women's work and men's work, equality rarely meant that men crossed over the divide to the women's side: our side – women's – the side where work was largely, though not exclusively, unpaid or poorly paid care of dependents.
Eva Feder Kittay
I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
G.K. Chesterton
Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But with respect to religion itself, without regard to names, and as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the divine object of adoration, it is man bringing to his maker the fruits of his heart; and though these fruits may differ from each other like the fruits of the earth, the grateful tribute of everyone is accepted.
Thomas Paine
There are defeats more triumphant than victories.
Michel de Montaigne
I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
John Ruskin
A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
To rejoice in conquest is to rejoice in murder.
Lao-Tsze
It is not your enemies that you need to conquer on the journey to greatness, but yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The ego lusts for satisfaction. It has a prideful ferocious appetite for its version of "truth". It is the most challenging aspect to conquer; the cause for most spiritual turmoil.
T.F. Hodge
All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.
Michel de Montaigne
The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.
Criss Jami
Success is not a luxury. It's a must. Succeed or die
Bangambiki Habyarimana