Quotes by Philosophers - Page 56

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
Henry David Thoreau
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
John Dewey
If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.
Daniel C. Dennett
For certain he hath seen all perfectnessFor certain he hath seen all perfectness. Who among other ladies hath seen mine: They that go with her humbly should combine To thank their God for such peculiar grace. So perfect is the beauty of her face That it begets in no wise any sign Of envy, but draws round her a clear line Of love, and blessed faith, and gentleness. Merely the sight of her inakes all things bow: Not she herself alone is holier Than all: but hers, through her, are raised above. From all her acts such lovely graces flow That truly one may never think of her Without a passion of exceeding love.
Dante Alighieri
I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.
Criss Jami
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
Understanding is important for studying,knowledge is important for teaching,and wisdom is important for living.
Matshona Dhliwayo
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.
Mikhail Bakunin
Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?
Friedrich Nietzsche
That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.
Thomas Paine
One who was adored by all in prosperity is abhorred by all in adversity.
Baltasar Gracián
Therefore, the pure righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom.
Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook
Learning is intelligence.Knowing is understanding.Practicing is wisdom.Teaching is virtue.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak.
Augustine of Hippo
A thorn is a rose's friend but a gardener’s enemy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Nihil est sine ratione.[There is nothing without a reason.]
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.
David Bentley Hart
Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.
Jacques Derrida
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley
Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil. Tis the sole remedy against misfortune the very ventilation of the soul.
Baltasar Gracián
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.
Marcus Aurelius
Soar with wit. Conquer with dignity. Handle with care.
Criss Jami
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Albert Camus
One of these grand defects, as I humbly conceive, is this, that children are habituated to learning without understanding.
Jonathan Edwards
A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend. If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.
Montesquieu
The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.
Nikos Kazantzakis
There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 'it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year.' In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 'it was not I, it was the weapon?
Mencius
And how does one basically recognize good development? In that a well-developed man does our senses good: that he is carved from wood which is hard, delicate, and sweet-smelling, all at the same time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal
we deceive ourselves in thinking that death only follows life whereas it both goes before and will follow after it for where is the difference in not beginning or ceasing to exist the effect of both is not to be
Seneca
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty.
Stefan Molyneux
Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.
Plato
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
Susan Sontag
Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.
Neel Burton
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
Aldous Huxley
Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.
Lao Tzu
Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?
Paolo Freire
…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
Jean-François Lyotard
Love has no wings, but is an angel. Lust has no horns, but is a devil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Courage leads starward fear toward death.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
G.K. Chesterton
One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop.
Denis Diderot
Better to wear out than to rust out.
Bishop Cumberland
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
Søren Kierkegaard
The truths that matter most to us come always half spoken.
Baltasar Gracián
One who never anticipates deceit or expects duplicity, and yet is the first to recognize such things – is that not a sage indeed?
Confucius
I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like.
Margaret Cavendish
No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.
Xenophon
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats.
Chris Matakas
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
Muriel Barbery
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I'm not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I'm somewhere in between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That's not too bad, after all!'He looked at me wickedly and started laughing.'As for you, boss,' he said, 'I think you do your level best to turn what you eat into God. But you can't quite manage it, and that torments you. The same thing's happening to you as happened to the crow.''What happened to the crow, Zorba?''Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly - well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.
Nikos Kazantzakis
To appreciate pleasure, someone had to experience pain; to appreciate joy, some had to experience sorrow; to appreciate love, some had to experience heartache; to appreciate freedom, some had to experience fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Freedom from the thinking mind is our underlying goal for most of human activity.
Chris Matakas
Heaven’s Tao is impartial,yet those who follow its compassionate waywill always be nourished
Lao Tzu