Quotes by Philosophers - Page 98

Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me,maybe this, or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.
Erich Fromm
You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it
Criss Jami
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradicts everything you said today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience.
Adam Smith
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
Baltasar Gracián
When dealing with two faced people, it is difficult to know which face is uglier, the real one or the manufactured one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is the heart which experiences God and not the reason.
Blaise Pascal
Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The good will is all — and all the talents are ways to fulfill it.
Abraham Isaac Kook
Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.
Jerome A. Miller
Brave men rejoice in adversity just as brave soldiers triumph in war.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
John Stuart Mill
Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.
Semen Frank
The government is ethics rape in perpetuity
Stefan Molyneux
It is in providing outward display for things and pathways as they exist within the horizons of landscape that places enable memories to become inwardly inscribed and possessed: made one with the memorial self. The visibility without becomes part of the invisibility within.
Edward S. Casey
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.
Erich Fromm
A man who rightly governs self, may also govern family without the crippling cowardice, crutch of control.
T.F. Hodge
The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.
Simone Weil
If you wish to reach the highest begin at the lowest.
Publilius Syrus
What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisingly vulgar expression of an ideological tradition that has, after many centuries, become so pervasive and habitual that most of us have no idea how to doubt its premises or how to avert its consequences. This is a fairly sad state of affairs, because those consequences have at times proved quite terrible.
David Bentley Hart
Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.
Voltaire
Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.
Simon Blackburn
What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?
Ayn Rand
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Think honestly.Think humbly.Think honorably.Think happily.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your soul fountain will never drain until the instant of eternity will halt before it to drink the water of death.
Sorin Cerin
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Zhuangzi
Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.
Neel Burton
Some of your hurts you have cured And the sharpest you still have survived But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quality is not an act. It is a habit.
Aristotle
As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally selfevident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights.
Herbert Spencer
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
If birds did not believe in their ability to fly, the sky would be empty.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
Epicurus
A lion does not take orders from sheep.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.
Mary Wollstonecraft
We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still
Henry David Thoreau
stand up, be bold. you are the sole and only cause.
Swami Vivekananda
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
G.K. Chesterton
Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.
Antonio Gramsci
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God.
Augustine of Hippo
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.
Edmund Burke
Give us, O Lord, a steadfast heart, which no unworthy affection may drag downwards; give us an unconquered heart, which no tribulation can wear out; give us an upright heart, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside. Bestow upon us also, O Lord our God, understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Thomas Aquinas
No matter how bitter the truth is, the beauty is that it liberates.
Gift Gugu Mona
[A man] finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capacities. He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law, [where] men... let their talents rest and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of their species - in a word, to enjoyment; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him, and have been given him, for all sorts of possible purposes.
Immanuel Kant
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus
I will always appreciate those who made me go through rough times because without those, I wouldn't have the wisdom and power that lies within me now.
Gift Gugu Mona
The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first.
Peter Kreeft
How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Jiu Jitsu gives me an ideal to strive toward. Technical mastery lies on an infinite continuum and completion of this skill is impossible. Every time I train I have something that I can improve upon, and this will hold true for each and every training session that lies between me and my grave.
Chris Matakas
The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
Auguste Comte