Quotes by Philosophers - Page 77

Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself.
Adam Miller
We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.
Albert Camus
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment… (…) Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under…
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death.
Titus Lucretius Carus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus
Words that defy reality are ominous. And it’s ominous reality that confronts those who would obscure the wise and worthy.
Mencius
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
G.K. Chesterton
You cannot catch a whale and a fish with the same bait.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is never ridicule, but a compliment, that knocks a philosopher off his feet. He is already positioned for every possible counter-attack, counter-argument, and retort...only to find a big bear hug coming his way.
Criss Jami
Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.
Noam Chomsky
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
Voltaire
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire
To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make!
Criss Jami
They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.
Erich Fromm
Women rescue men just as much as, if not more than, men rescue women.
Criss Jami
How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
Voltaire
A loyal pet is better than a faithless friend.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.
Ayn Rand
So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, share and give. They can enjoy all that their freely exercised labour can secure for them and even, if they choose, do nothing and still survive. You can take away the freedom to buy and sell; you can compel people to work on terms that they would not freely accept; you can confiscate property or forbid this or that form of it. But if those are the alternatives to ‘capitalism’ there is, now, no real alternative save slavery.
Roger Scruton
Recognizing Nothing as one's true nature, following the guidance of our conscience - having a clear distinction between absolute and relative values, and using the Earth as the external absolute scale that matches the internal absolute truthfulness.
Ilchi Lee
Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.
Ayn Rand
And may I live the remainder of my life ... for myself may there be plenty of books and many years' store of the fruits of the earth!
Horace
Ask for a fish, and you only get one; ask for a net, and you can catch dozens.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more offensive than feeling like you have to re-evaluate your own train of thought and purpose in life. You have to die to an extent in your hunger for faith, for wisdom, and quite frankly, most people aren't ready to die.
Criss Jami
Many of the activities we pursue, the resources we consume, and the waste products we create are the products of our desire to make our bodies a little more comfortable and carefree. Whether it’s food, exercise, music, alcohol, sex, drugs—whatever the stimulus—ultimately what we seek is a feeling of satisfaction. In the end, though, true satisfaction arises from a balance of healthy, harmonious energy. And that harmonious, balanced energy is the core of the natural healing power.
Ilchi Lee
The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
Thomas Nagel
We are looking for value, guidance, advice, inspiration; for someone to show us the way. When we find him, he is our hero
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Albert Camus
Nowadays, you can do anything that you want—anal, oral, fisting—but you need to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection.
Slavoj Žižek
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan W. Watts
Purity both of the body and the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God's grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person.
Augustine of Hippo
Because we want to be inwardly secure, we are constantly seeking methods and means for this security, and thereby we create authority, the worship of another, which destroys comprehension, that spontaneous tranquility of mind in which alone there can be a state of creativeness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
In mastering one thing, you have mastered all things because you have learned how to learn.
Chris Matakas
It is therefore worthwhile, to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things, whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasions.
John Locke
Today's tears are an investment into tomorrow's smiles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living
John Cage
We... have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call "war.
Erich Fromm
Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable
Friedrich Nietzsche
I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I may sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material. Politics, I demand, must uphold equalitarian and individualistic principles; dreams of beauty have to submit to the necessity of helping men in distress, and men who suffer injustice; and to the necessity of constructing institutions to serve such purposes.
Karl R. Popper
Saying that you do not remember something or someone is a less embarrassing or hurtful way of saying that you do not know it or them anymore.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Iris Murdoch
If the Internal enemy of hatred is not tamed, when one tries to tame external enemies, they increase. Therefore, it is a practice of the wise to tame themselves by means of the forces of love and compassion.
Bodhisattva Tokmay Sangpo
You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.
Stefan Molyneux
It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among them.
Peter Singer
It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Being divorced does not necessarily make one’s advice on marriage useless … or useful.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the "because" can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.
Rebecca Goldstein
I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.
Robert M. Pirsig
You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running.
Ayn Rand
Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
In every area of life everyone is capable of seeing from a higher perspective than they do now.You are never stuck. You're simply limited by the level you are seeing from.Limitation is always illustion. Just wait. Relax. Stay still. Wait until the wisdom talks to you, as it will. - Syd Banks
Sydney Banks
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
If love was a crime, God would encourage us all to go to prison.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No books is more fascinating than the Bible. And no books are less fascinating than most of our commentaries on the Bible. Nothing is more formidable and unconquerable than the Church Militant. But nothing is more sleepy and sheepish than the Church Mumbling. Christ's words roused His enemies to murder and His friends to martyrdom. Our words reassure both sides and send them to sleep. He put the world in a daze. We put it in a doze.
Peter Kreeft
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
Daniel C. Dennett
As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe the possibility exists.
William Salter