Quotes by Philosophers - Page 81

Causality is a pointless superstition. These days it would take more than one book to persuade anyone of that.
Arif Ahmed
A butterfly is a caterpillar who never gave up on his dream to fly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When birds eat from your hand, they are letting the whole world know that they trust you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those who do not succeed do not believe in their ability to exercise the potential power to forge beyond perceptions of limitations.
T.F. Hodge
Elders in the dark see better than children in the light.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
Max Stirner
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
Sam Harris
Dear fear, I’m divorcing you. Dear courage, I’m courting you. Dear hope, I’m pursuing you. Dear love, I’m marrying you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
No matter how much and how often - 'things' will never compensate for loss or absence...no matter how guilty a parent feels.
T.F. Hodge
Sorrowers tend to avoid what they are most fond of and try to give vent to their grief.
Seneca
Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?
John Cage
Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A freedom-fighter is a slave to freedom.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You become what you allow yourself to become.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To have an empty head is worse than to have an empty bank account.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.
Criss Jami
Knowledge of sin is the beginning of salvation.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
But memory is less disposed to compromise
Albert Camus
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
Alan W. Watts
A lion never loses sleep over a sheep's sentiments.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207)
Alain de Botton
the marketplace is capable only of calculating exclusive costs; that is; excluding all possible costs that interfere with profit. Leadership of society requires the calculation of inclusive costs. To invoke the marketplace, as if calling upon the Holy Spirit, is to limit ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
John Ralston Saul
The essence of enlightenment … is a big understanding, which gives you a deep and wide perspective to see the world as a whole, and a capacity to accept with compassion all that is. 11/26
Ilchi Lee
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
G.K. Chesterton
Not every instance requires a response. Truth resides silently in the seat of power.
T.F. Hodge
The surface of learning is hearing what your ears aren't prepared to hear, and the core of learning is hearing what your ears don't want to hear.
Criss Jami
There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics for then we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.
Isaiah Berlin
Know thine opportunity.
Pittacus
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
Will Durant
If you want to make a stand, help others make a stand, and if you want to reach your goal, help others reach their goal. Consider yourself and treat others accordingly: this is the method of Humanity.
Confucius
In a society that prioritizes man’s health, a cleaner is more important than a lawyer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
Edmund Burke
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life in order to keep it.
G.K. Chesterton
Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
G.K. Chesterton
There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.
Alain de Botton
Average leaders take you to the mountain.Superior leaders take you up the mountain.Excellent leaders take you to mountaintop.Transcendent leaders take you to the stars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion -- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint -- and Mr. Gish [Duane T. Gish the Creation Scientist] is but one of many to make it -- the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
Michael Ruse
To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If they are gods, why do you lament them? If you lament them, you must no longer regard them as gods.
Heraclitus
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritual grace, this maintaining the self in a state of blindness, and also with the flow of animal grace, which leads to the impairment of natural functions and, in the long run, of the slower processes called structure. For each individual human being, the main practical problems are these: How can I prevent my ego from eclipsing the inner light, synteresis, scintilla animae, and so perpetuating the state of unregenerate illusion and blindness? And these practical problems remain unchallenged, even if we abandon the notion of an entelechy or physiological intelligencer, of an atman or pneuma and think, instead, in terms [of] systems...
Aldous Huxley
A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.
Francis Bacon
My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42
Georges Bataille
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.
José Ortega y Gasset
To be beyond yourself is the gate to wisdom.
Sorin Cerin
When I was young, I believed God was a woman because I couldn't come up with any other explanation as to why the universe was so tidy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ordinary people are products of their environment. Extraordinary people make their environments products of them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph de Maistre
Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act. Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.
Confucius
Do not hold grudges against those who try to keep you down; the higher you go, the smaller they become. Do not trust those who try to push you down once you are up;the more envious they are, the more dangerous they become.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?
Criss Jami
Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
Aristotle
Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco