Quotes by Philosophers - Page 93

The only place you will find love before sacrifice is in the dictionary.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself. It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan W. Watts
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A wise servant is better than a foolish ruler.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Reason forbade me many things which,Instinctively, my nature was attracted to;And a perpetual loss I feel if, knowing,I believe a falsehood or deny the truth.
Abul 'Ala' Al-Ma'arri
Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our parents would not be ‘The best parents in the world’ (to us) if they were not our parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living
Confucius
...the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating... that collectedness and presence of mind...the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break.
Eugen Herrigel
A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Albert Camus
Fortune is like the market where many times if you can stay a little the price will fall.
Francis Bacon
Their doubt is your fuel for dreams. You just have to drive.
Criss Jami
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire
Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.
Criss Jami
He is so rich, he has no room to shit.
Marcus Aurelius
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The gentleman understands what is moral. The small man understands what is profitable.
Confucius
The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.
William James
More love, more power.Less love, less power.Great love, great power.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The hardest thing in life is a man to be honest with himself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
Manuscripts - at least for Muslims who understand the subject - are to be read as books whose contents are to be known and understood, for that is why they were written, and not to be regarded as enigmatic specimens for critical textual and philological exercises. To them what is in the manuscripts is more important than what is on them, and so they say: Al-'ilmu fi'l-sudur la fi'l-sutur.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Stanisław Lem
Men seek a great deal, but fatally close, albeit very different, is one's pride in proving oneself right with one's zeal for finding the truth.
Criss Jami
So as long as you have not attained to desirelessness, as long as you have not renounced desires completely, you will go on taking births and wandering in different bodies. And howsoever different the forms of the body may be, their basic condition is always the same. The ills of the body are the same, regardless whether it’s a bird’s body or man’s. There is no difference in their miseries, because the fundamental misery is only one: the soul becoming confined in the body, the entering of the soul into the prison of body. A prison after all is a prison; it makes no difference whether its walls are circular or angular no matter what you think.
Osho
It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent.
John Stuart Mill
truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.
Martin Heidegger
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
Geoffrey Chaucer
Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.
Augustine of Hippo
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
Bertrand Russell
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
I love the forest.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business.It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)
John Ralston Saul
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence
Jean Baudrillard
When men shake hands with time, time crushesThem like tumblers; little pieces of glass.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.
George H. Smith
When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.
Vauvenargues
The spoon’s color does not change the soup’s taste.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily.
Plato
The idea that there is are all these people who are going to make all these great and wise decisions with guns. Because you know all the people who can make the best decisions in the world always want to be armed; because they are really smart, really wise, know exactly what should be done in society so naturally they want lots of guns. You get how insane that is right? The only people who want to force you to do stuff are people who know their ideas are shit to begin with. "It's a basic fact of life that anyone who wants to force you to do something means their ideas are shit to begin with. Not a lot of rapists are very good lovers because they don't have to sell quality; they got violence. Everyone is mad at Barack Obama's website from hell but they [the government] don't care because if you don't pay them they will throw you in jail. "The people with the best ideas are the most voluntary. The best parents don't beat their children. In fact if you beat your children you are saying 'I'm a shitty parent; I don't know what I'm doing and I'm pretty sadistic.' A rapist is saying I'm not a good boyfriend. Why do we even need to say this? People with guns are saying to your face, 'My ideas suck, I'm a bully, I get a thrill out of power so fucking do what I say or I'll shoot you in the ass.
Stefan Molyneux
The time has come when I must divest Bimala of all the ideal decorations with which I decked her. It was owing to my own weakness that I indulged in such idolatry. I was too greedy. I created an angel of Bimala, in order to exaggerate my own enjoyment. But Bimala is what she is. It is preposterous to expect that she should assume the role of an angel for my pleasure. The Creator is under no obligation to supply me with angels, just because I have an avidity for imaginary perfection.
Rabindranath Tagore
I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally "godless" -- that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describe.One might very well conclude, for instance, that the world contains far too much misery for the pious idea of a good, loving, and just God to be taken very seriously, and that any alleged creator of the universe in which children suffer and die hardly deserves our devotion.It is an affective -- not a strictly logical -- position to hold, but it is an intelligible one, with a certain sublime moral purity to it; I myself find it deeply compelling; and it is entirely up to each person to judge whether he or she finds any particular religion's answer to the "problem of evil" either adequate or credible.
David Bentley Hart
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
Susan Sontag
For 1,300 days of Sarajevo's drama, important people in the world who were supposed to act kept their eyes closed, ... But not you. You were not silent. Your voice was clear.
Alijia Izetbegovic
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand
He who has foresight has more than two eyes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He is wretched indeed, who goes up and down in the world, without a God to take care of him, to be his guide and protector, and to bless him in his affairs [. . .] That unconverted men are without God shows that they are liable to all manner of evil [. . .] liable to the power of the devil, to the power of all manner of temptation [. . .] to be deceived and seduced into erroneous opinions [. . .] to embrace damnable doctrines [. . .] to be given up of God to judicial hardness of heart [. . .] to commit all manner of sin, and even the unpardonable sin itself. They cannot be sure they shall not commit that sin. They are liable to build up a false hope of heaven, and so to go hoping to hell [. . .] to die senseless and stupid, as many have died [. . .] to die in such a case as Saul and Judas did, fearless of hell. They have no security from it. They are liable to all manner of mischief, since they are without God. They cannot tell what shall befall them, nor when they are secure from anything. They are not safe one moment. Ten thousand fatal mischiefs may befall them, that may make them miserable forever. They, who have God for their God, are safe from all such evils. It is not possible that they should befall them. God is their covenant God, and they have his faithful promise to be their refuge.
Jonathan Edwards
Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.
Voltaire
Instead of being regarded as intelligent or knowledgeable, many a woman would rather be regarded as beautiful or good in the kitchen; many a man, as handsome or good in bed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.
Søren Kierkegaard
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
Aristotle
A bird that fears turbulence will never know how high it can fly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Originality is the death of mediocrity.
Matshona Dhliwayo