Quotes by Philosophers - Page 21

The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.

Thomas Aquinas

A seemingly simple task like taking a bath or wearing a condom feels like multitasking to someone who suffers from hemiplegia or has only one hand.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first. If someone's actions help me to some benefit I desire, then I am benefited in any case; but if he intended them so to benefit me because of his general goodwill towards me, I shall reasonably feel a gratitude which I should not feel at all if the benefit was an accidental consequence unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim.

Peter Frederick Strawson

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.

Sam Harris

High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.

Immanuel Kant

The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled

Muhammad Iqbal

It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.

G.K. Chesterton

Sleep knocks on my eyes: they grow heavy. Sleep touches my mouth: it stays open.Truly, he comes to me on soft soles, the dearest of thieves, and steals my thoughts from me

Friedrich Nietzsche

You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don't make a lot of sense, in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway.

Sam Harris

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.

Umberto Eco

Better is the enemy of the good.

Voltaire

When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.

Vauvenargues

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

Bertrand Russell

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.

Criss Jami

You don’t have any problems — only this much has to be understood. This very moment you can drop all problems. because they are your creations. Have another look at your problems: the deeper you look, the smaller they will appear. Go on looking at them and by and by they will start disappearing. Go on gazing and suddenly you will find there is emptiness — a beautiful emptiness surrounds you. Nothing to do, nothing to be, because you are already that.

Osho

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.

Voltaire

Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.

Blaise Pascal

What supporters say about their leadertells men a third about who he is.What supporters do for their leadertells men two thirds about who he is.What supporters give up for their leadertells men all of who he is.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Karl R. Popper

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Ayn Rand

What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.

Mortimer J. Adler

of their passions in the same object at that particular time.

Adam Smith

In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin

Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.

Nayef Al-Rodhan

How many things can I do without?

Socrates

As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.

Neel Burton

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.

Umberto Eco

Riches are for spending.

Francis Bacon

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

Alain de Botton

Science cannot disprove god. Science studies the things that are. The eternal question is who or what made them to be

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Light is all a flower longs for, even when surrounded with priceless jewels.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength the marrow of Nature.

Henry David Thoreau

When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master.

Aristotle

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Alain de Botton

As the sun hides behind clouds, success hides behind trouble.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The first forty years of life give us the text the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Schopenhauer

The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.

Immanuel Kant

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

Otto Weininger

If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.

Peter Singer

Every life is a unique random business

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Through storms you are able to get all the colors you need to paint the rainbow.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Since in early youth it cannot be known what ends are likely to occur to us in the course of life, parents seek to have their children taught a great many things, and provide for their skill in the use of means for all sorts of arbitrary ends, of none of which can they determine whether it may not perhaps hereafter be an object to determine their pupil, but which it is at all events possible that he might aim at; and this anxiety is so great that they commonly neglect to form and correct their judgement on the value of the things which may be chosen as ends.

Immanuel Kant

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Henry David Thoreau

The folly of one man is the fortune of another.

Sir Francis Bacon

all misery comes from fear, from unsatisfied desire.

Swami Vivekananda

If you'd called me an ox, I'd have said I was an ox; if you'd called me a horse, I'd have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you'll only lay yourself open to double harassment.

Zhuangzi

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.

Augustine of Hippo

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

Albert Camus

A business plan is like a war plan, when you competitors know about it, it's no longer of any use

Bangambiki Habyarimana

What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never an end in itself. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: they are as vain as that.

Nietszche

Meditation need not mean sitting in a special posture. Nonetheless, we can use certain physical and mental exercises to calm the noises of the mind and body, and sensitize us to the sound of the soul.

Ilchi Lee

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.

Ivan Illich

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom

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