Quotes by Philosophers - Page 53

Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
Criss Jami
All that may be wished for, will by nature fade to nothing.
Śāntideva
My heart knows what my mind only think it knows.
Noah Benshea
The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.
Amos Bronson Alcott
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged from the beginning of the world that such as are in the institution wish to get out and such as are out wish to get in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.
Michel Foucault
When life’s great storms come, the weak sink, the cowardly jump ship, the strong drop an anchor, the mighty adjust their sails, and the great sail on to their destiny.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.
Osho
Politicians look for interests not people
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Epicurus
In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.
Sam Harris
There is something pleasurable in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.
Cicero
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They have a special confidence in Christ, plus thoughtfulness plus faithfulness plus humility: for there are no things, in all creation, more beautiful, more rare than the so very disciplined and free, joyful and principled daughters of God.
Criss Jami
Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.
Hermes Trismegistus
Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.
Aristotle
True love is like diamonds; scarce, and priceless.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover the meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Happy the man, and happy he alone,he who can call today his own:he who, secure within, can say,Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.Be fair or foul, or rain or shinethe joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,but what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Horace
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Karl Marx
When you are suffering from sexual starvation, a spank or even a hug seems like a porn scene.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
Once I was liable to the same mistakes, but, thanks to God, no longer …’Well, isn’t it just as worthwhile to have devoted and applied yourself to this goal as to have read or written fifty pages?
Epictetus
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy may be blind without science, but science can lack vision without philosophy.
Scott O'Reilly
MIND is not a dustbin to keep anger, hatred and jealousy. But it is the treasure box to keep, love happiness and sweet memories.
Swami Vivekananda
Were a man to order his life by the rules of true reason a frugal substance joined to a contented mind is for him great riches.
Lucretius
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuateddeity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
David Hume
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.I read it every week.Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s seriousbut me.
Allen Ginsberg
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps
Karl Marx
Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.
Criss Jami
…Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.” - The Narrator.
Nikos Kazantzakis
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned even the meanest yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades - that of government.
Socrates
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.
Aldous Huxley
Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep –
Aldous Huxley
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The tailor bird builds her nest in deep woods, she uses no more than one branch.The mole drinks off the river, it can only fill one belly.
Zhuangzi
Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To live each day as though one's last never flustered never apathetic never attitudinizing-here is perfection of character.
Marcus Aurelius
The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.
Henry David Thoreau
When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liverty or anarchy.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
Jean Vanier
Choice is the doorway to our creative power. To unleash this power, we must begin from the state of beingness.
Ilchi Lee
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
Karl R. Popper
I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.
Voltaire
Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The authority of those who profess to teach is often a positive hindrance to those who desire to learn.
Cicero
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
We try to show that the well-ordered society of justice as fairness is indeed possible according to our nature and those requirements. This endeavor belongs to political philosophy as reconciliation; for seeing that the conditions of a social world at least allow for that possibility affects our view of the world itself and our attitude toward it. No longer need it seem hopelessly hostile, a world in which the will to dominate and oppressive cruelties, abetted by prejudice and folly, must inevitably prevail. None of these may ease our loss, situated as we may be in a corrupt society. But we may reflect that the world is not in itself inhospitable to political justice and its good. Our social world might have been different and there is hope for those at another time and place
John Rawls
The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.
Noam Chomsky
The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.
Criss Jami
Great men learn from their weaknesses,and learn to use their strengths.Ordinary men learn nothing from their weaknesses,and underuse their strengths.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt
Immanuel Kant
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Marcus Tullius Cicero