Quotes by Philosophers - Page 355

Prayer is not a court hearing, so when you pray don't aim to prove before God how others wronged you; because He knows every heart already.
Gift Gugu Mona
Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.[Carnap’s famous plea for tolerance to which W.V. Quine took exception.]
Rudolf Carnap
Social anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are.
Stefan Molyneux
Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which results from an undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures; and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable, and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.
Thomas More
There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.
Plato
We cannot conceive death as anything else than the afterlife because we cannot comprehend death unless we live.
Sorin Cerin
Do today what will profit you tomorrow. Avoid forever what did not profit you yesterday.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy ... is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.
Ralph Waldo Trine
Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not.
Rabindranath Tagore
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin
Would a robber break in your home at night beating drums? Nope. This is how those who want to take advantage of your life come: Full of smiles and promising sincere friendship!
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.
G.K. Chesterton
Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco
Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.
Neel Burton
For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
Robert Musil
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.
G.K. Chesterton
The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.
John Stuart Mill
There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
Sam Keen
A felicidade nunca é graciosa.Happiness is never gracious.
Aldous Huxley
Conscience, the divine nature within us, sees everything as connected, what’s good for all is always its priority.
Ilchi Lee
If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.
Michael Huemer
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.
Marcus Aurelius
The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you have to make a choice and don't make it that is in itself a choice.
William James
Actually I've never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer-slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you're going to get it. There's no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, "Okay, Nature, that's the end of the nice guy," and you crank up the formal scientific method.
Robert M. Pirsig
I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.
Allen Ginsberg
Some people start to live when they die
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically "meaningful," while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the "meaningless." Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch, but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being.
William Barrett
One learns wisdom from sorrow, but pleasure is one of the fruits of wisdom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the seabather comes after the icy shok of the sea bath.
G.K. Chesterton
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
Erich Fromm
Before Venus, censorious; before Mars, timid.
Michael Walzer
To be called insane: challenge convention. To be called possessed: challenge religion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People think that fun in Christ is non-existent, but there is fun wherever your heart lives.
Criss Jami
Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.
Criss Jami
The one thing worth living for is to keep one's soul pure.
Marcus Aurelius
I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.
René Descartes
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
Eric Hoffer
In proportion as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason.
Baruch Spinoza
I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, ‘Am I happy?’ and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, ‘No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.' Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first…Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there. In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
It's utter arrogance to think that we can know what god ought to be or do. If we don't understand we must continue our search or recognize our ignorance
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration.
Machiavelli
Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
José Ortega y Gasset
If a man does not treat you like a princess during courtship, he will not treat you like a queen during marriage.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
Colin Wilson
It is at the edge of intelligence that wisdom awaits.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When reaching for the stars, beware of those who want to cut off your hands.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The barrier during self-improvement is not so much that we hate learning, rather we hate being taught. To learn entails that the knowledge was achieved on one's own accord - it feels great - but to be taught often leaves a feeling of inferiority. Thus it takes a bit of determination and a lot of humility in order for one to fully develop.
Criss Jami
The relatives of a suicide always take it in bad part that he did not remain alive out of consideration for the family dignity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.
Albert Camus
You don’t have any problems — only this much has to be understood. This very moment you can drop all problems. because they are your creations. Have another look at your problems: the deeper you look, the smaller they will appear. Go on looking at them and by and by they will start disappearing. Go on gazing and suddenly you will find there is emptiness — a beautiful emptiness surrounds you. Nothing to do, nothing to be, because you are already that.
Osho
- Government -Free Shit for Idiots
Stefan Molyneux
Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.
Ivan Illich
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
G.K. Chesterton