Quotes by Philosophers - Page 36

To those supremacist racists I ask what color will be their bodies when they turn to dust.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is my belief that when a child has been robbed of their visionary rights that they gravitate toward religion and spirituality in an effort to regain their Subjective autonomy.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
Light is always one step ahead of darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.
G.K. Chesterton
A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get.We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society.
Michael Polanyi
Men are handicapped in love, either in giving or in receiving. They consider love as a sign of weakness
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.(Marx, 1963)
Karl Marx
You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
Spring is proof that there is beauty in new beginnings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.
Thomas More
If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.
Voltaire
Where there are two on point of independently distinguished purposes, you will find one infinite journey whose path is blazed with the guiding light of wisdom.
T.F. Hodge
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
Ayn Rand
We often use the Bible as a source for personal validation and defense, a sidekick and a shield, but these will prove ineffective without first the other part. We must also allow ourselves to be wounded by it. We tend to forget its authority - that it is a double-edged sword. Our decrepit, depraved hearts must be completely ripped out in order to welcome that of God.
Criss Jami
An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
William James
Storms come to teach trees and plants how to dance in the wind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Shadows are in reality when the sun is shining the most conspicuous thing in a landscape next to the highest lights.
John Ruskin
A hundred years ago, an average teenager knew countless authors, and, a sex position or two. Today, an average teenager knows countless sex positions, and, an author or two.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
John Ruskin
To be "great" is an ego goal; to be real is existential.
Osho
It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
Eric Hoffer
Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
What is important is not to fight, but to fight the right enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.
Albert Camus
He who on earth has lived in the conjugal state as he should live, will be placed among the Gods who dwell in heaven
Thiruvalluvar
Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits.
Ernst Cassirer
You cannot reach the stars feet on the ground.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.
Alain de Botton
The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.
Epicurus
Hear others, and you will be heard.Understand others, and you will be understood.Help others, and you be will be helped.Love others, and you will be loved.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
Karl Marx
In the land where excellence is commended, not envied, where weakness is aided, not mocked, there is no question as to how its inhabitants are all superhuman.
Criss Jami
My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.
Alan W. Watts
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.
Aldous Huxley
Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs.
Michel de Montaigne
An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Each man lives in his own universe and when he dies the world is over
Bangambiki Habyarimana
One who throws stones at others has less to use to build his own house.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Pray daily.Pray daringly.Pray desperately.Pray determinedly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
Denis Diderot
Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
All I know is that I do not know anything
Socrates
Love has two rules: the first one is love, and the second one is love some more.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A god who gave us everything we wanted would be the most malevolent god of all. With an infantile curiosity, we insist on tasting the cockroach on the floor while our father is preparing a magnificent feast for us.
Criss Jami
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
Bertrand Russell
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Nick Bostrom
It is not death that a man should fear he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
Erich Fromm
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself: and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
Immanuel Kant
The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Throw a warrior to the wolves and he’ll return a conqueror.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
G.K. Chesterton
If the heart be chiefly and directly fixed on God, and the soul engaged to glorify him, some degree of religious affection will be the effect and attendant of it. But to seek after affection directly and chiefly; to have the heart principally set upon that; is to place it in the room of God and his glory. If it be sought, that others may take notice of it, and admire us for our spirituality and forwardness in religion, it is then damnable pride; if for the sake of feeling the pleasure of being affected, it is then idolatry and self-gratification.
Jonathan Edwards
The summit of pleasure is the elimination of all that gives pain.
Epicurus
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether be a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything good or true that the angels inspire in us is God’s, so God is constantly talking to us. He talks very differently, though, to one person than to another.
Emanuel Swedenborg