Quotes by Philosophers - Page 70

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.
Aldous Huxley
Love is the politics of sex
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Translation by Sharon Lebell
Epictetus
We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a Pasha or a Sultan who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.
Voltaire
He who does not desire or fear the uncertain day or capricious fate is equal to the gods above and loftier than mortals.
Justus Lipsius
What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.
William Barrett
When I look back at where I come from, I realize it's for a good reason that God changed my life.
Gift Gugu Mona
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
Simone de Beauvoir
Man is like an island set in isolation in a fathomless sea enveloped by darkness, saying that the loneliness his self knows is so utterly absolute because even he knows not his self completely.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
Henry David Thoreau
We may not know whether our understanding is correct, or whether our sentiments are noble, but the air of the day surrounds us like spring which spreads over the land without our aid or notice.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
One owes loyalty, only, to those who demonstrate in kind.
T.F. Hodge
...only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.
Paul Tillich
Count your summers, not your winters.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The traditional, correct pre-Marxist view on exploitation was that of radical laissez-faire liberalism as espoused by, for instance, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. According to them, antagonistic interests do not exist between capitalists, as owners of factors of production, and laborers, but between, on the one hand, the producers in society, i.e., homesteaders, producers and contractors, including businessmen as well as workers, and on the other hand, those who acquire wealth non-productively and/or non-contractually, i.e., the state and state-privileged groups, such as feudal landlords.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Love is divine ink: miracles are God's signature.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it. But should I suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.
Thomas Paine
Princes always are always happy to see developing among their subjects the taste for agreeable arts and for superfluities which do not result in the export of money. For quite apart from the fact that with these they nourish that spiritual pettiness so appropriate for servitude, they know very well that all the needs which people give themselves are so many chains binding them. When Alexander wished to keep the Ichthyophagi dependent on him, he forced them to abandon fishing and to nourish themselves on foods common to other people. And no one has been able to subjugate the savages in America, who go around quite naked and live only from what their hunting provides. In fact, what yoke could be imposed on men who have no need of anything?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
...His argument, as set out in The Problems of Philosophy, was based on the empirical fact that we are not only aware of things but are also, very frequently, aware of being aware of them.
A.J. Ayer
Those who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
Freidrich Hayek
In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man’s dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You can put all your eggs in one basket if God has told you to.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.
Friedrich von Schiller
The path of Tao is not that of sudden enlightenment. It is not like Zen. Zen is sudden enlightenment, Tao is gradual growth.
Osho
We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
Edmund Burke
The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.
Marcus Aurelius
Words do have purpose; they are essential clues in determining actions, or lack thereof.
T.F. Hodge
Let us eat, drink, and love for tomorrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Reh Gyi Rasm-e-Azan, Rooh-e-Bilali Na RahiFalsafa Reh Gya, Talqeen-e-Ghazali Na RahiAzan yet sounds, but never now Like Bilal’s, soulfully;Philosophy, conviction-less, Now mourns its Ghazzali
Muhammad Iqbal
Who dares nothing need hope for nothing.
Friedrich von Schiller
As the sun lives on when it sets in the warmth it has given to others, you too will live on in the hearts of those whose lives you have touched.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.
Albert Camus
Retirement is a stage where an employer discards an employee that he cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
After all, what Buddhism offers as a solution is universalised indifference - a learning of how to withdraw from too much empathy. This is why Buddhism can so easily turn into the very opposite of universal compassion: the advocacy of a ruthless military attitude, which is what the fate of Zen Buddhism aptly demonstrates.
Slavoj Žižek
The body should be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting.
Rousseau Jean-Jacques 1712-1778
Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.
Stefan Molyneux
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
William James
The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmonized Greek civilization with Roman ideals
John Mark Reynolds
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
Voltaire
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
Noam Chomsky
The beauty all around you is insignificant in comparison to the beauty within you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A gentleman is not a pot.
Confucius
The universe is a philosophical abyss.
Kedar Joshi
Wealth won’t make you happy. Power won’t make you remarkable. Fame won’t make you honorable. Education won’t make you wise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.
Henry David Thoreau
The cult of friendship disturbs me. It's like our quality is supposed to be measured by the number of friends we have. For me, it's quite the inverse. When somebody says "I'm friends with everyone" I just assume they have the spine of your average jellyfish and the integrity of your average soap dish. "I have tons of close friends!" Ok, then you obviously have no standards. "I've slept with lots of people!" Good, I will shake your hand from inside this Hazmat suit. It's like you have to have friends or you're nothing, and you gotta have lots of friends, and the more friends you have the more value you have. This Is a way of lowering our standards to fit in. I'm a big fan of quality over quantity. Everyone wants to look at their life like it's a beer commercial they can just climb into. The larger the circle of friends the more alcohol is involved to blind yourself to the fact that you cant stand most of these assholes.
Stefan Molyneux
If things far away don’t concern you, you’ll soon mourn things close at hand.
Confucius
From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
Mortimer J. Adler
A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is the song you dance to when reality sings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The creation of man is evidence for the love of God, the preservation of man is evidence for the patience of God, and Christ is evidence for the forgiveness of God. It is when we are wrapped up in our own little peeves that we begin to displace His benevolence with malevolence.
Criss Jami
Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.
Simone de Beauvoir
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)
Horace
Love makes you the richest person in the world, no matter how poor you are.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Before you wear a crown of gold, life sometimes makes you wear a crown of thorns.
Matshona Dhliwayo