Quotes by Philosophers - Page 13

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

John Stuart Mill

The greatest weight a bird gives up when preparing to fly is fear.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If a man hears much that a woman says she is not beautiful.

Henry S. Haskins

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

Peter Kreeft

The most valuable things in your life are always the things that money cannot buy.

Matshona Dhliwayo

From attraction and affectionCover of perfectionFailure beyond texture to a painful lessonEverything that was from the start wasn't from the heart

Criss Jami

You win minds through your brilliance. You win hearts through your tenderness. You win souls through your benevolence.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.

Julia Kristeva

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.

Mark Rowlands

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Ayn Rand

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Socrates

Asking the question of being is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of spirit and hence for an originary world of historical Dasein. It is indispensable if the peril of world-darkening [Weltverdüsterung] is to be forestalled and if our Volk at the center of the West is to take on its historical mission.

Martin Heidegger

The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.

Bertrand Russell

Follow your heart, not the latest headlines.

T.F. Hodge

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

Ayn Rand

And because the condition of man . . . is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can to defend ourselves.

Thomas Hobbes

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

Bruce Lee

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

Arthur Schopenhauer

A flower in a desert still has no reason to envy a thorn in a rainforest.

Matshona Dhliwayo

To deceive oneself is worse than to deceive others." These harsh words pierced me to the core.

Shinichi Suzuki

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

G.K. Chesterton

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

G.K. Chesterton

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You will be able to live as your authentic self when you find that infinite source of energy and that mind, bright and shining like the sun. Then you won’t need to become anyone other than yourself. You won’t need to depend on externals for your health and happiness, and you won’t need to look outside yourself to find passion and hope for life.

Ilchi Lee

You cannot skip the beginning and hope to reach the end. You will fall as soon as you get there

Bangambiki Habyarimana

An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.

Ilyas Kassam

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.

Alain de Boton

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By the grace of God we will never pluck unripe fruit. We will never press people to decision, because we'll lead them to damnation and not salvation.

Jonathan Edwards

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.

Karl Marx

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear without having so much as a smile for the young future.

Simone de Beauvoir

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

George Santayana

Love has two rules: the first one is love, and the second one is love some more.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

Aldous Huxley

With the exception of a gun, starvation is the only thing that is capable of making an insane man lose his mind.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.[Chapter X - 15,16]

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius

There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften.

Cicero

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

William Barrett

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

Aristotle

The critical nature of 'choices' -- [the] timing will prove to be an asset or liability; it will reward wisdom or expose stupidity. Either way, we learn from the path of suffering or satisfaction… by choice or by design.

T.F. Hodge

In Rome you long for the country. In the country you praise to the skies the distant town.

Horace

A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.

Criss Jami

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.

Alain de Botton

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.Source: The Wisdom of Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

Most people, if they know they have done wrong, foolishly suppose they can conceal their error by defending it, and finding a justification for it; but in my belief there is only one medicine for an evil deed, and that is for the guilty man to admit his guilt and show that he is sorry for it. Such an admission will make the consequences easier for the victim to bear, and the guilty man himself, by plainly showing his distress at former transgressions, will find good grounds of hope for avoiding similar transgressions in the future.

Arrian

God is always the first one there when we fall,but most of us don’t look up.

Matshona Dhliwayo

...man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...

Ayn Rand

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

Umberto Eco

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Bertrand Russell

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Aldous Huxley

Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.

Confucius

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

Eric Hoffer

If you have legs that work, walk in the right direction. If you have an audible voice, say constructive words. If you have functional eyes, see great things. If you are in a position of power, use it productively and if you have a sound mind, think exceptionally; for such is not a given, but grace.

Gift Gugu Mona

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