Quotes by Philosophers - Page 84

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle
Never underestimate a warrior; the lion in him may be sleeping, but that does not mean he’s dead.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
Stefan Molyneux
Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.
John Cage
In general, I feel if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.
John Rogers Searle
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Nicolas Chamfort
Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The good life as I conceive it is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Bertrand Russell
He who walks with the wise goes farther than he who runs with fools.
Matshona Dhliwayo
you are the cause by which I die
Geoffrey Chaucer
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
Otto Weininger
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
You cannot force a dry well to yield water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.
Plato
If the entire world sought to make itself worthy of happiness rather than make itself happy, then the entire world would be happy.
Criss Jami
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.
Ernst Cassirer
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.
Hannah Arendt
True champions, like the sun, cannot be eclipsed for long.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life.
Protagoras
Be willing for purpose; it pays huge returns on investment. And along the journey, those who dis your willing sacrifice(s) will ponder their own foolishness.
T.F. Hodge
A conditioned mind is never a free mind.
Bruce Lee
Wisdom is intelligence set on fire.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you have the power to put a smile on one person’s face, you have the power to change the world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
Bertrand Russell
Some of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.
Friedrich Nietzsche
our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.
Sam Harris
In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.
Aristotle
The instinct of worship is still so strong upon us that, having nearly worn out our capacity for treating kings and such kind of persons as sacred, we are ready to invest a majority of our own selves with the same kind of reverence.
Auberon Herbert
The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word.
Sam Keen
A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.
Confucius
Any good person who is motivated to attain awareness of the whole truth should follow the Universal Way to calm his mind and harmonize it with all aspects of life.
Lao Tzu
Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.
Alan W. Watts
Live as if you were a country and other people as other nations. Then learn politics
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If your eyes are blinded with your worries you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.
Michel de Montaigne
The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within.
Muhammad Iqbal
A whale has nowhere to hide in a river.
Matshona Dhliwayo
But what is great can only begin great.
Martin Heidegger
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
G.K. Chesterton
We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant.
Marquis de Sade
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
G.K. Chesterton
[S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.
Nel Noddings
According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention.
Matthew B. Crawford
I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations.
Peter Singer
Broken pencils still write beautiful songs.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Juice is a poor man’s dessert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me be content with myself to the degree that my capacity to serve others is present, yet discontent with myself to the degree that I may still like to grow in better service for others.
Criss Jami
I never really grew up until I had kids.
Stefan Molyneux
So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.
Bertrand Russell
Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Choose always the way that seems the best however rough it may be custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
Pythagoras
There's some end at last for the man who follows a path mere rambling is interminable.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.
Jostein Gaarder
We should realize that an opinion is not easily formed unless a person says and hears the same things every day and practises them in real life.
Epictetus