Quotes by Philosophers - Page 20

When in fear it is safest to force the attack.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

Iris Murdoch

...we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life.

René Descartes

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

William H. Gass

...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

G.K. Chesterton

Today is tomorrow’s stepping stone, but for the wise it is a ladder.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The greatest love stories are not written by the ink of the pen, but by the ink of the heart.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.

Sam Harris

I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.

Nikos Kazantzakis

a problem well put is half solved.

John Dewey

If you don't take inventory of your blessings, ingratitude will try to steal them from you.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.

David Hume

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

Noam Chomsky

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.

G.K. Chesterton

I miss you,” is how she entices you.“I want you,” is how she charms you.“I need you,” is how she entraps you.“I love you,” is how she imprisons you.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years

Tim Maudlin

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

Auguste Comte

And further, observing that all this indeterminate substance is in motion, and that no true predication can be made of that which changes, they supposed that it is impossible to make any true statement about that which is in all ways and entirely changeable. For it was from this supposition that there blossomed forth the most extreme view of those which we have mentioned, that of the professed followers of Heraclitus, and such as Cratylus held, who ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and who criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.

Aristotle

The past has no power to stop youfrom being present now.Only your grievance aboutthe past can do that.What is grievance?The baggage of oldthought and emotion.

Lao Tzu

You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.

Josef Pieper

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Seneca

Where the world only sees a seed, an optimist sees a tree.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A rose does not cease to be a flower because it lost one petal.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

Simone Weil

Those who put you in difficult times are enemies.Those who forsook you in difficult times are acquaintances.Those who stood by you in difficult times are friends.Those who fought for you in difficult times are family.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Pleasure awakens the body, wisdom awakens the mind, joy awakens the heart, and love awakens the soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Happiness is activity of soul.

Aristotle

Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.

John Ruskin

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

Sam Harris

So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…

Jostein Gaarder

The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world.

Josef Pieper

We live like sheep in line waiting to be slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. We eat and laugh and fight as we see those in front of us fall to the knife

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We only think when we are confronted with a problem.

John Dewey

The heart that gives, gathers.

Lao Tzu

This world, the eternally imperfect, the eternal and imperfect image of a contradiction – an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator – that is what I once thought the world.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.

G.K. Chesterton

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Who knows if the gods above will add tomorrow's span to this day's sum?

Horace

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

William James

When the lion is wounded do not stroke its mare.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

Henry David Thoreau

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

Karl Marx

Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Thomas Carlyle

There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic.

Arthur Schopenhauer

What kind of ministry is that, just talking to people?" Criticism directed at Francis Schaeffer's plan to open an obscure spot in the Swiss Alps to those who came with questions.

Nancy Pearcey

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

G.K. Chesterton

We are creatures built on a house of cards of language.

Stefan Molyneux

A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.

Swami Vivekananda

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Albert Camus

A teacher instructs;a student absorbs.A book is a companion;a good one, a messiah.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

Swami Vivekananda

My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.

Voltaire

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

Herbert Spencer

It is in the shade that you look up at a tree and appreciate its efforts.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Great leaders think beyond yesterday, deal with the issues of today and focus on addressing the problems of tomorrow.

Gift Gugu Mona

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