Quotes by Philosophers - Page 90

As common as unplanned sex. As uncommon as a planned child.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Tears water the eyes when they have been dry for too long.
Matshona Dhliwayo
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows.
John Dewey
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Augustine of Hippo
No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
Ayn Rand
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment
Michel de Montaigne
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Henry David Thoreau
A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
Paul Evdokimov
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
Simone de Beauvoir
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.
Slavoj Žižek
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Thomas Paine
Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.
Criss Jami
Meditation, godliness, enlightenment, nirvana, they all came into being through love, because through love a glimpse was achieved. And when the glimpse was there, daring souls went on an adventure to find the source from where this glimpse comes.
Osho
Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been.
Aristotle
...[F]reedom... is a property of all rational beings.
Immanuel Kant
Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.
Erich Fromm
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.
Henry David Thoreau
There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.
Gift Gugu Mona
We are force-fed beliefs through incessant advertisements by a culture that ceaselessly fosters our conformity to values which are of no service to the individual.
Chris Matakas
He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.
William H. Gass
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
The greatest mountain is still made of grains of sand.
Matshona Dhliwayo
For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions. I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. The kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific, in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed. I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.
Bertrand Russell
There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.
Cornel West
How much soul can include the self-salvation of sin?
Sorin Cerin
Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden.
Ayn Rand
When an eagle spreads its wings to fly, even the swan is envious.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
It is better to enlighten men’s minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
We hate people who honestly tell us what they think about us. We wish we were what we are not
Bangambiki Habyarimana
As the gift of the Creator, natural healing power is ours. That’s why no special method is needed for recovering it. There are no perfect methods, no matter how effective or powerful they may be. What is perfect is our sense of life itself.
Ilchi Lee
Those who envy you inadvertently admit to being inferior to you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
John Stuart Mill
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
Simone de Beauvoir
...a woman not yet seen, but whose perfume accumulates on the horizon like a storm cloud.
Fernand Dumont
A rose’s beautiful scent is extracted only when it is crushed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained.
Heraclitus
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
Voltaire
I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.
G.K. Chesterton
There is a limit for everything. You can't just load tons and tons of peacock feathers in a cart considering it's light weight. If you do, it will damage the axle of the cart.
Thiruvalluvar
Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.
George Santayana
If you live long enough you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
Simone de Beauvoir
Once there is realization of self challenge, ego versus soul, competition with others becomes futile.
T.F. Hodge
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.
Augustine of Hippo
Taking a step in the dark is braver than taking a leap in light.
Matshona Dhliwayo
you will not be master of my body & my property
Geoffrey Chaucer
Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.
Paul Evdokimov