Quotes by Philosophers - Page 57

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
If you have much, be generous; if you have little, be grateful; even if you have nothing, be hopeful.
Matshona Dhliwayo
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
Noam Chomsky
A divided mind cannot conquer a united soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Coat your words with honey if you want to catch bees.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[I would] rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
Democritus
Greatness awaits those who can rise from their greatest failures.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If virtue were its own reward it would no longer be a human quality but supernatural.
Vauvenargues
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.
Augustine of Hippo
While the whole world was asleep, the caterpillar was awake, working towards becoming a butterfly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God alone can finish.
John Ruskin
If you shake a tree, fruit must fall, no matter how reluctant it is.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all.
Immanuel Kant
An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner..
Immanuel Kant
With me, everything turns into mathematics.
René Descartes
Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Teaching comes through the head, learning happens through the heart.
Osho
Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body.
Rudolf Steiner
Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Voltaire
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
Sam Harris
In Italy we have not a Common law legal system, we have a stupid one instead!
Carl William Brown
Finding out that you are not your lover’s only lover hurts, but not as much as discovering that you are the side chick … or the side dick.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is a war. Guerrilla warfare, the strategy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Be calm when your wife yells at you, calmer when she chastens you, but be terrified when she ignores you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you want to understand the inner workings of the human mind, read good fiction.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Alain de Botton
Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.
Pierre-Louis Moreau De Maupertuis
All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
G.K. Chesterton
When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife.
G.K. Chesterton
Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)
Ayn Rand
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
Albert Camus
Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition, or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct.
John Locke
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must like men undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
We use our minds in a way similar to how we use a scale - it tells us its worth, its value. But what if the scale has not been accurately recalibrated to zero? What if you had forgotten to remove mental and emotional baggage?
Ilchi Lee
Man is a question mark . . . and it is a blessing—celebrate it. It is a blessing because only man is a question mark; no dog is, no tree is. The rose bush is beautiful but not as beautiful as man, and the moon is beautiful but not as beautiful as man—because they are unconscious. Only man is consciously on a quest. And how can you be on a quest if you don’t have a question mark in your being?
Osho
What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.
Henry David Thoreau
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Don't ignore your dreams, in them your soul is awake and you are your true self.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The sea in all its vastness is its own, real world. Man is nature's sci-fi.
Criss Jami
Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbor to have them through envy.
Aristotle
Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
A tie is what you get after ice cubes have wrestled with hot water.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
…egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand. To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of a society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, ‘We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.’ Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.
Ryszard Legutko
If you can't share what's important to you with the people around you, then you have no relationships. It's all just proximity, and turkey, and sports, and weather, and bullshit.
Stefan Molyneux
The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.
Aldous Huxley
Individualism turns a band into a society. Collectivism turns society into a mob.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.
Sorin Cerin
In a materialistic society, man is likely to value the opinion of a rich man over that of a poor one; even when coming to opinions that have absolutely nothing to do with moneymaking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
Thomas Paine
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
Voltaire
What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.
Epictetus
There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times.
Voltaire
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
Simone de Beauvoir
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
Alfred North Whitehead
There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn’t deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, anymore than your name is actually you.Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn’t that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Blessed be childhood which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.
Henri Amiel
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius