Quotes by Philosophers - Page 48

If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
Albert Schweitzer
Even if, by some especially unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of stepmotherly nature, [the good will] should be wholly lacking in the power to accomplish its purpose; if with the greatest effort it should yet achieve nothing, and only the good will should remain (not, to be sure, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), yet would it, like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself.
Immanuel Kant
Life has a positive and negative side. Happy people ignore the negative side
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Theodor Adorno
In times of stress be bold and valiant.
Horace
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill
Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....
Michel Foucault
Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
Aristotle
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
Maximus was my model for self-control, fixity of purpose, and cheerfulness under ill-health or other misfortunes. His character was an admirable combination of dignity and charm, and all the duties of his station were performed quietly and without fuss. He gave everyone the conviction that he spoke as he believed, and acted as he judged right. Bewilderment or timidity were unknown to him; he was never hasty, never dilatory; nothing found him at a loss. He indulged neither in despondency nor forced gaiety, nor had anger or jealousy any power over him. Kindliness, sympathy, and sincerity all contributed to give the impression of a rectitude that was innate rather than inculcated. Nobody was ever made by him to feel inferior, yet none could have presumed to challenge his pre-eminence. He was also the possessor of an agreeable sense of humour.
Marcus Aurelius
We are a dream of a thought which lives trough the Word.
Sorin Cerin
Diamonds are a girl's best friend until love introduces her to her soulmate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A politician will promise the moon but deliver an ant hill
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
William James
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.
Umberto Eco
The only thing I hate about good people is that they like making their being good people bad people’s problem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient infinite woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ...divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
Hélène Cixous
Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Lao Tzu
…because it is natural to touch more often the parts that hurt.
Seneca
Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep.
Heraclitus
Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy.
John C. Lennox
I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God’s existence isn’t important. It’s what we do with what we’ve got that counts.
Michael Ruse
A personal revolution is the consequence of confronting self - as is.
T.F. Hodge
Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...
Jean-Paul Sartre
For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.
Thomas Carlyle
Memories rob us of the present.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?”t“Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.
Plato
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
Most people do not mind dying, as long as that does not happen today.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
Dante Alighieri
When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion.
T.F. Hodge
Stumbling up a hill strengthens you more than sprinting down a mountain.
Matshona Dhliwayo
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
Michel de Montaigne
A bear does not change its nature because it shed its fur.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house.
Socrates
I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tombs of the Capulets.
Edmund Burke
Let no one ever intimidate you, you are standing on no one's ground. But again, some have claimed the earth as their own and usurped power from the rest of us. But they are usurpers; power belongs to every one of us. Seek it as much as possible. There is no shame in that. In fact it's a necessity. Either you have power or you are trampled to death in the stampede to get to the top
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
A river cannot boast to a sea.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
Democritus
Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
You don't win battles you walk away from.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Rivalry discovers that courtesy overlooks.
Baltasar Gracián
To expel hunger and thirst there is no necessity of sitting in a palace and submitting to the supercilious brow and contumelious favour of the rich and great there is no necessity of sailing upon the deep or of following the camp What nature wants is every where to be found and attainable without much difficulty whereas require the sweat of the brow for these we are obliged to dress anew j compelled to grow old in the field and driven to foreign mores A sufficiency is always at hand
Seneca
Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.
Albert Camus
To see the farm is to leave it.
Stefan Molyneux
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
Edmund Burke
For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
Write it on your heartthat every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the daywho allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish every day and be done with it.You have done what you could.Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;begin it well and serenely, with too high a spiritto be cumbered with your old nonsense.This new day is too dear,with its hopes and invitations,to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.
David Hume
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?
Umberto Eco
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked issomething startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious andbasic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it aHintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our mindswhich we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" asa lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful andcommonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech andthought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experienceselfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. Iseem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—arare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe ofbiological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only tovanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and evenabsurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in thewhole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclearfields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old;my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply thepulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
Alan W. Watts
We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.
Dallas Willard
The reason we have choices in life, is so we don't blame anyone for the consequences of our decisions.
Gift Gugu Mona
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Umberto Eco