Quotes by Philosophers - Page 5

Rule your mind or it will rule you.
Horace
Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it.
Umberto Eco
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no devil but fear.
Elbert Hubbard
Most of our waking life is make believe. If there was a way to record every dream that crosses our minds, the true nature of humans would be laid bare
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Be your own master, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal creature.
Marcus Aurelius
Shatter the limits in your mind and you shatter the limits in your life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Whenever they are condemning weaves or breast implants, some people speak so passionately that their false teeth almost fall out.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.
Charles Taylor
I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
Muriel Barbery
All can be done if the god-touch is there
Sri Aurobindo
When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves
Jostien Gaarder
God creates, not that there may be witnesses to render Him His due glory, but beings who shall rejoice in it as He rejoices in it Himself and who, participating in His being, participate at the same time in His beatitude. It is not therefore for Himself, but for us, that God seeks His glory; it is not to gain it, for He posses it already, nor to increase it, for already it is perfect, but to communicate it to us.
Étienne Gilson
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be adult is to be alone (etre adulte c'est etre seul).
Jean Rostand
A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.
G.K. Chesterton
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
Henry David Thoreau
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…
John Stuart Mill
If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me harm, why should they have any desire towards that? For what advantage would result to them from this or to the whole, which is the special object of their providence? But if they have not determined about me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at least, and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with them.
Marcus Aurelius
The future is hope!
John Fiske
Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.
David Hume
If you want kids, choose your girlfriend like your future child has the deciding vote.
Stefan Molyneux
For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.
Henry Sidgwick
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao Tzu
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
Ayn Rand
Those who say that money can’t buy one love make it sound as if love can buy one money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.
Will Durant
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)
David Bentley Hart
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
Boethius
When a small night-lamp alone illuminated our love-making, it became a very small, circular room which silently passed through nights humming with stars.
Fernand Dumont
Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;It is the reflex of our earthly frame,That takes its meaning from the nobler part,And but translates the language of the heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.
Michael J. Sandel
Men marry for the womb. Women marry for their tummy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
... murder wol out
Geoffrey Chaucer
Love is without a doubt the laziest theory for the meaning of life, but when it actually comes a time to do it we find just enough energy to over-complicate life again. Any devil can love, whom he himself sees as, a good person who has treated him well, but to love also the polar opposite is what separates love from fickle emotions.
Criss Jami
Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.
G.K. Chesterton
From the errors of others a wise man corrects his own.
Publilius Syrus
...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.
Ernst Cassirer
What torments of grief you endured from evils that never arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
Erich Fromm
For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without regretting the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.
Michel Foucault
Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows.
Lucian Blaga
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
How to write a book? Start writing,continue writing and finish writing.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie.
Criss Jami
You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find remarkable change taking place in you – a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything – not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying; to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus gong by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen – it is only then that there is a struggle.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
One day, the old wise Socrates walks down the streets, when all of the sudden a man runs up to him "Socrates I have to tell you something about your friend who...""Hold up" Socrates interrupts him "About the story you're about to tell me, did you put it trough the three sieves?""Three sieves?" The man asks "What three sieves?""Let's try it" Socrates says."The first sieve is the one of truth, did you examine what you were about to tell me if it is true?" Socrates asks."Well no, I just overheard it" The man says."Ah, well then you have used the second sieve, the sieve of good?" Socrates asks "Is it something good what you're about to tell me?""Ehm no, on the contrary" the man answers."Hmmm" The wise man says "Let's use the third sieve then, is it necessary to tell me what you're so exited about?""No not necessary" the man says."Well" Socrates says with a smile "If the story you're about to tell me isn't true, good or necessary, just forget it and don't bother me with it.
Socrates
The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.
Albert Camus
An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions.
John Dewey
Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila
Robert M. Pirsig
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not be endured with patient resignation.
Bertrand Russell
All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.
Swami Vivekananda
Difficulties are things that show what men are.
Epictetus
Your true beliefs are known in agony
Bangambiki Habyarimana