Quotes by Philosophers - Page 351

Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.
Ayn Rand
Humanity must forgive 'Humanity', for only then can we be Humane.
Ilyas Kassam
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
When people are bored it is primarily with their own selves.
Eric Hoffer
Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this [man's] happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs.
G.K. Chesterton
The first petition that we are to make to Almighty God is for a good conscience the next for health of mind and then of body.
Seneca
Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.
Alvin Plantinga
He who will not economize will have to agonize.
Confucius
Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
Denis Diderot
The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
Rabindranath Tagore
Grass is never green by accident.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What you do for others today you have done for yourself tomorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.
Alan W. Watts
This disease of curiosity.
Augustine of Hippo
Greed's worst point is its ingratitude.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.
Theodor W. Adorno
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
Ernst Haeckel
For the duration of his erection: To a horny man, all women are the most beautiful woman in the world.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A faint hearted man will always be poor
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Once born, how long a man will live matters. Once dead, how long he has lived doesn’t.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We see only a part of the surface of things. The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence.
Richard Taylor
I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.
Michel de Montaigne
The change of the word does not alter the matter
Thomas More
It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate.
Criss Jami
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...
Immanuel Kant
We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?
Śāntideva
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
José Ortega y Gasset
A great storm is like a sunny day to a person of great faith. A gentle wind is like a great storm to a person of great fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.
José Ortega y Gasset
I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.
Stanisław Lem
Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word never to withdraw one.
Baltasar Gracián
Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances a hundred things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Envy is a sign that you are being overtaken
Bangambiki Habyarimana
One should attend carefully to the fear and desperation of the powerful. They understand very well the potential reach of the "ultimate weapon," and only hope that those who seek a more free and just world will not gain the same understanding and put it effectively to use.
Noam Chomsky
Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.
Stefan Molyneux
All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!
William James
You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.
Criss Jami
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.
René Girard
The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes that slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within.... After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make... The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.
P.D. Ouspensky
A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped for everything cannot be equally considered in a word he must be able to simplify his duties his business and his life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is when those who are not strong enough have made some moderate amount of progress that they fail and give up...
Confucius
The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.
Augustine of Hippo
The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks.Moreover, it speaks of everything.
Cornelius Van Til
The greatest mountain anyone can conquer is fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Spiritual leaders, priests and prophets are lamps burning in the dark, seeking meaning for humanity.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
Theophrastus
I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life.
Ilchi Lee
He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.
Albert Camus
To be evenminded is the greatest virtue.Wisdom is to speakthe truth and actin keeping with its nature.
Heraclitus
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
Pain is always a fanged serpent, but to the fearful it has a hundred heads.
Dagobert D. Runes
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
Ayn Rand
Meeting, for the first time in person, someone that you’ve ‘known’ for sometime online = Taking the relationship to the ‘previous’ level.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
First, fear will mock you, then fear will taunt you, then fear will oppose you, and if you ignore it, only then will it flee from you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As the river enters into the ocean,so my heart touches Thee.
Kabir