Quotes by Philosophers - Page 2

Though people sort of need your permission to talk to you, they do not really need one to talk about you.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great storm is like a sunny day to a person of great faith. A gentle wind is like a great storm to a person of great fear.

Matshona Dhliwayo

We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

Eric Hoffer

If those who know why and how neglect to act, those who do not know will act, and the world will continue to flounder.

Alfred Korzybski

Some people are ignorant of the world but educated in Scripture, and are therefore prone to missing the relevance of Scripture - these sometimes, later, amidst life's challenges and doubts, turn from the faith; other people are ignorant of Scripture but educated in the world, and are therefore prone to missing the truth of Scripture - they are often those who ridicule the faith. The apologist stands somewhere in the center. He articulates where some are prone to understanding the truth in beauty, others the beauty in truth - that of a spiritual Creator in relation to his scientific creation.

Criss Jami

Juice is a poor man’s dessert.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.

Titus Lucretius Carus

To talk about God, except in the context of prayer, is to take His name in vain.One may, indeed, talk to a child about God, but this is on a par with telling him that he was brought to his mother by a stork.

Ferdinand Ebner

It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.

Thomas Carlyle

When you are aspiring to the highest place it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.

Cicero

Knowing more than someone does not necessarily mean that you know every single thing they know.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.

Erich Fromm

Think much, say little, do much.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.

Friedrich Schiller

Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole.

W. Norris Clarke

Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.

Ayn Rand

It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never intentionally given pain even to another.

Marcus Aurelius

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

D.T. Suzuki

He who is brave is free

Seneca

And after winter folweth grene May.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.

Meister Eckhart

We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie?

Rabindranath Tagore

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.

Henry David Thoreau

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Alan W. Watts

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.

Vauvenargues

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

Marquis de Sade

We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place.

Chris Matakas

Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.

Criss Jami

Defining by a general law the expenditures on the...school....is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.

Karl Marx

The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.

John Stuart Mill

Some people are here on earth because they were sent to hell

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.

Jean-Paul Sarte

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Bertrand Russell

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.

Noam Chomsky

We are but faint-hearted crusaders...our expeditions are but tours...half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure, never to return, --prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms...if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

Henry David Thoreau

God alone can finish.

John Ruskin

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

Alain de Botton

We tend to have a limited concept of spiritual death as saying no only to things we want or covet -- our guilty pleasures and selfish ambitions. But in reality, it means dying inwardly to whatever has control over us. The thing that really controls us may not be what we want. It may be what we fear. Fear can dominate our lives just as strongly as desire.

Nancy Pearcey

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.

David Bentley Hart

The language of Energy-Consciousness, LifeParticles, can be universal for all life-forms. To enliven it ask yourself, “How would I feel if …” and just feel - how other people feel, how the oceans, forests, animals and the Earth feel. Through this language, you can deliver your feeling and intent to others and consciously experience your connection to all beings.

Ilchi Lee

The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

Friedrich A. Hayek

But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.

Olaf Stapledon

It is vain to ask of the gods what man is capable of supplying for himself.

Epicurus

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Pain is the seasoning that gives pleasure its flavor.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

Aristotle

Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!

Swami Vivekananda

Your mind has the intellect to lift the world,your heart has the wisdom to better the world, and your soul has the genius to elevate the world.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

Heraclitus

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

Alain de Botton

Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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