Quotes by Philosophers - Page 71

Gloating is a superficial glowing, floating is an idle flowing, and bloatedness is the paralysis of blowing up; because silent movement results in loud victories.
Criss Jami
One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.
Baltasar Gracián
Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')
Dōgen
The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is…emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty.
Robert M. Pirsig
Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.
Baruch Spinoza
Valid questions are better than invalid assumptions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
Il est ce qui échappe à l'activité des hommes, à la reconsidération et à la correction de leur œuvre.
Guy Debord
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H. Gass
Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Knowledge makes you strong,wisdom makes you powerful,and love makes you invincible.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.
Marquis de Sade
Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
Voltaire
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
José Ortega y Gasset
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
Stefan Molyneux
Do the possible, and let God do the impossible.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Hatred comes from the heart contempt from the head and neither feeling is quite within our control.
Arthur Schopenhauer
For one to be free there must be at least two.
Zygmunt Bauman
The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women; yet, at school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty at home.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Peace is something you only have when your enemy is gone. Either after you have turned him into a friend or vanquished him
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one
Ludwig Wittgenstein
For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.
Thomas More
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Marshall McLuhan
It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?
Martin Buber
Can I tell from the twilight from which the world is built that I am a sunrise in this life?
Sorin Cerin
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
Eric Hoffer
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery
Dante Alighieri
All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.
Ivan Illich
Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?
Rabindranath Tagore
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched—just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance—so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Thosewho lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.
Albert Camus
When at work, be diligent because there are many people who wish they had your job, but they couldn't since you are the one who got.
Gift Gugu Mona
And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I.
Ayn Rand
For no man is found so prudent as to know how to adapt himself to these changes, both because he cannot deviate from the course to which nature inclines him, and because, having always prospered while adhering to one path, he cannot be persuaded that it would be well for him to forsake it. And so when occasion requires the cautious man to act impetuously, he cannot do so and is undone: whereas had he changed his nature with time and circumstances, his fortune would have been unchanged.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.
Blaise Pascal
The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied.
Aldous Huxley
Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.
Paul Valéry
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.
Ayn Rand
I like to search for class struggle in strange domains. For example it is clear that in classical Hollywood, the couple of vampires and zombies designates class struggle. Vampires are rich, they live among us. Zombies are the poor, living dead, ugly, stupid, attacking from outside. And it's the same with cats and dogs. Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy.
Slavoj Žižek
The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.
Criss Jami
Dreams have to be made real, not reality changed into dreams.
Osho
Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, 'Wake up! Love! Pray!
Criss Jami
And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
... Desire baffles knowledge and power.
Jean-François Lyotard
Our true reality is not a limited phenomenon, existing only between birth and death. It is eternal life that exists alone, self-existent and self-sufficient, the essence of all that is, was, and ever will be throughout the universe. That is what you really are.
Ilchi Lee
You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.
Jean Vanier
In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
Louis Althusser
Was there someone absent from the table of creation?
Sorin Cerin
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
Alain de Botton
A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.
Sebastian Marincolo
Marry someone you can live with, and you have found your companion; marry someone you can’t live without, and you have found your soulmate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.
Sam Harris
Success is subjective. Your dream bank balance could be someone else’s nightmare.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
City life - millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
John Mark Reynolds
The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity.
Ayn Rand