Quotes by Philosophers - Page 12

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

Aldous Huxley

Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.

Frédéric Gros

Death follows stagnation

T.F. Hodge

Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?

William Barrett

The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.

Edmund Burke

I never feel unsafe except for when the majority is on my side.

Criss Jami

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards...in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others.

Ayn Rand

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Albert Camus

Translation is the art of failure.

Umberto Eco

Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.

Ortega y Gasset

Most people would instantly start feeling ten years older if someone were to convince them that they were actually born a decade before their birthdate.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Immanuel Kant

Ah if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Design and produce yourself according to your dreams

Bangambiki Habyarimana

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

Noam Chomsky

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

Michel de Montaigne

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Hell is truth seen too late.

Thomas Hobbes

A wise man is one who creates a harmony between head, heart, and body. In this harmony one comes to the revelation of the source of one’s life, the very center, the soul. And that is the greatest ecstasy possible – not only to human beings but in this whole universe, nothing more is possible. It is already too much.

Osho

We need to protect and care for our children because when society fails to protect its children, there will be no one else to learn from.

Gift Gugu Mona

Imagine a true master of the art, someone with complete skill in every aspect of Jiu Jitsu. This master would not force anything. He would simply allow the roll to take whatever form it does, and in every position would act in the most efficient way based off what the circumstance dictates, and not what he himself prefers.

Chris Matakas

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.

Confucius

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.

T.F. Hodge

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.

Stefan Molyneux

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

Umberto Eco

The wolf pounces on the sheep when the shepherd strays.

Matshona Dhliwayo

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

Elbert Hubbard

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.

Umberto Eco

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Bertrand Russell

A man is known by the books he reads.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

God loves each person, I believe; although, just like we do in our private homes, He reserves His kingdom only for those whom He enjoys.

Criss Jami

It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species.

John Ruskin

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Søren Kierkegaard

Following your dreams is better than being led by your fears.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The gentleman understands what is moral. The small man understands what is profitable.

Confucius

You know what awareness is only when you are aware. Awareness is the perception of your presence in the now.

Ilchi Lee

Count your summers, not your winters.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Meister Eckhart

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

Karl Marx

Taking a leap of faith is better than taking a leap of doubt.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Sunglasses are more useful to a blind man than freedom of speech is to a man who does not think for himself.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.

Jostein Gaarder

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...

Umberto Eco

What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.

Voltaire

We all want to become more than we are, we want to live forever, that is why we hate death and create the afterlife.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

Criss Jami

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

G.K. Chesterton

Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Lao Tzu

It is better to doubt that a concept is stupidly flying under your head than profoundly flying over your head.

Criss Jami

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.

Alain de Botton

Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.

Voltaire

The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.

Peter Sloterdijk

Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.

Albert Camus

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

Nikos Kazantzakis

When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief

Alain de Botton

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him." - Gaston Bachelard, "Reveries on Reverie (Anima - Animus)", The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Page 88

Gaston Bachelard

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