Quotes by Philosophers - Page 99

Simply minding one's own business is more offensive than being intrusive. Without ever saying a word one can make a person feel less-than.
Criss Jami
Even those who want to go to heaven would rather kill than be killed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who talk too much are tiresome, especially those who are not informative, thought-provoking, or funny.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Emil M. Cioran
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
Niccolò Machiavelli
When the blind lead the blind the world is full of casualties.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A man leaves his great house because he's boredWith life at home, and suddenly returns,Finding himself no happier abroad.He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,And yawns before he's put his foot inside,Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,Or even rushes back to town again.So each man flies from himself (vain hope, becauseIt clings to him the more closely against his will)And hates himself because he is sick in mindAnd does not know the cause of his disease.
Titus Lucretius Carus
I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.… But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope.
G.K. Chesterton
You need to have the means to impose yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
Aldous Huxley
You go on trying and trying, and you make many decisions and you take many vows,but nothing happens -- you remain the same. Not that you have not tried,not that you have not tried enough, you have tried and tried and tried. And you fail because it is not a question of effort. More effort won't help. It is a question of being alert, not of effort.
Osho
Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.
Rabindranath Tagore
Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
Bertrand Russell
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists
G.K. Chesterton
Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
Thomas Aquinas
The more closely two organisms depend upon each other the harder it becomes to tell where one organism ends and the other begins.
Chris Matakas
If you want to know how fortunate you are, visit three places: the slum, the hospital, and the cemetery.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you blame gravity for falling in love, even God has the right to laugh at you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds the roof over his head. he industriously removes the obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him; and much more valuable things than he.
G.K. Chesterton
All actual life is encounter.
Martin Buber
In some cases, people with a body (whose size) they did not long for are victims of having a bank balance (whose size) they longed for.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone de Beauvoir
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Albert Camus
Being nice merely to be liked in return nullifies the point.
Criss Jami
When men are rightfully occupied then their amusement grows out of their work as the color petals out of a fruitful garden.
John Ruskin
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.
Martin Buber
The second orgasm has a biblical connotation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.
G.K. Chesterton
Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
Michel de Montaigne
But though hast come and all will surely change.
Sri Aurobindo
It's the duty of every man to free himself. Never accept to live an underdog's life in god’s world.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.
Rabindranath Tagore
Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of yourself.
Pascal
Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.
Josef Pieper
He who let's the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation
John Stuart Mill
Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.
Noam Chomsky
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
Albert Camus
But these trees don’t grow impatiently. They move with a grace, with patience, with trust. There is no hurry anywhere else except in your mind. If you really want to be in a state of peace and joy, you will have to unlearn your old habit for achieving things quickly
Osho
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others but it also becomes richer and happier.
Albert Schweitzer
The Ancient Mariner said to Neptune during a great storm "O God you will save me if you wish but I am going to go on holding my tiller straight."
Michel de Montaigne
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
The greatest universe is not somewhere out there, but inside of yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.
Ayn Rand
It used to be said "Build it and they will come," now it is "Build it and bribe them in".
Bangambiki Habyarimana
All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Edmund Burke
Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.
Aristotle
Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]
Edmund Burke
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.
Adam Smith
Imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, that is, they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands, they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples.
Immanuel Kant
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Rebecca Goldstein