Quotes by Philosophers - Page 7

, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it couldnever have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely becauseit might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.
G.K. Chesterton
There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When we consider that so few generations had passed since thechurch left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of theirfamilies, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturingscholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about thenature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to thinkanything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.
Sam Harris
On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
Ayn Rand
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
To believe in luck ... is skepticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?
Umberto Eco
A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
Bernard de Fontenelle
Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone de Beauvoir
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Light another’s path and the universe will light your own.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!
Karl Marx
When everyone drowns and I'm the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I'm the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Forgive those who hurt you yesterday.Reward those who help you today.Remember those who help you tomorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Elevate your inside game. A negative attitude is below the horizon...a place for lonesome hearts.
T.F. Hodge
Through Christ, the sting of death is but a gentle pinch to the soul; and the mourn is light. Perhaps, someday, in that glorious place, free of sin, we shall meet again.
Criss Jami
You are infinite intelligence, creativity and Energy-Consciousness which gives you the power and wisdom to attain fulfillment and completion in life.
Ilchi Lee
The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.
Robert M. Pirsig
Together, we form a necessary paradox; not a senseless contradiction.
Criss Jami
He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment — that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live — that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life. To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.""Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence."I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Aldous Huxley
The thoughts that come often unsought and as it were drop into the mind are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
John Locke
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
G.K. Chesterton
True love makes you sleep and dream. But loud reality wakes you up
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you have shed a thousand tears, expect a thousand blessings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Not all ‘whites’ are racists. Not all racists are ‘white.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Champions are made in the dark before they are revealed in light.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The knowledge of God without that of man's misery causes pride. The knowledge of man's misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery.
Blaise Pascal
Rather than the kind of change that takes what we already have and augments it, like power to our cars and speed to our computers, I believe the kind of change we need now is a change of direction.
Ilchi Lee
No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.
Thomas More
The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.
Mortimer J. Adler
Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.
Epictetus
There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.
John Dewey
Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.
Jean de La Bruyère
This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
Isaiah Berlin
If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.
Julius Evola
I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”“You call that freedom?”“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Ayn Rand
Given the opportunity of 'Earth-School' enrollment - some are humble enough to learn and grow, stubborn enough to fail and repeat, and wise enough to graduate and never return.
T.F. Hodge
The boundary between good and evil are clearer for more common folks but gets blurred more and more as people get more power over their fellows.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't expect it to be given to you. It is there already. Get it if you want it.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.
George Santayana
…praise does not make anything better or worse.
Marcus Aurelius
Instinct is untaught ability.
Alexander Bain
Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg but my will, not even Zeus himself can overpower.
Epictetus
Charity: begins at home and remains there. When it goes out, it's because it wants to brag about itself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Pearls of wisdom are better than necklaces of diamonds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance.
Gary Hayden
That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a kid my heart would break for the villains.
Criss Jami
Many a parent, sad to say, has used their child as an opportunity for them, the parent, to do, through their child, something or some of the things that they, the parent, did not do or did not do successfully.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dad?""What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us."What should I be when I grow up?"The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.
Robert M. Pirsig
Whoever possesses God in their being has Him in a divine manner, and He shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.
Meister Eckhart
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.
Criss Jami
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson