Quotes by Philosophers - Page 24

It requires as much caution to tell the truth as to conceal it.

Baltasar Gracián

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

Iris Murdoch

The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.

G.K. Chesterton

A genuine smile is one of the world’s rarest treasures.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.

Bertrand Russell

The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.

James Mackintosh

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still.

Criss Jami

The Truth Is That Existence Wants Your Life To Become A Festival Because When You Are Unhappy, You Also Throw Unhappiness All Around.

Osho

The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

Alain de Botton

Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.

Gilles Deleuze

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

Eric Hoffer

Simple truths are a relief from grand speculations.

Vauvenargues

One of the major obstacles impeding any positive future change in our lives is that we are too busy with our current work or activity. Levi quit his tax-work, Peter stopped fishing at lake, Paul ceased being a priest. They all left their jobs because they thought it was necessary.

John Ruskin

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

Socrates

In following the Way, the noble-minded treasure three things: a manner free of violence and arrogance, a countenance full of sincerity and trust, a voice free of vulgarity and impropriety.

Confucius

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

Robert M. Pirsig

It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.

Thomas Carlyle

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Susan Sontag

Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.

Augustine of Hippo

If our eyes could see everything, every man would see his own faults.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men.

Ayn Rand

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

Albert Camus

In light, there is no darkness; and in darkness, there is no light.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If i am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it

G.E. Moore

To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.

Bertrand Russell

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard

[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.

Osho

If you press grapes, wine will pour out; if you crush roses, perfume will pour out; if you afflict the talented, genius will pour out.

Matshona Dhliwayo

So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.

Bertrand Russell

It is rude to tweet while having sex. However, it is not rude to have sex while tweeting.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Watch. Whenever mind says something, see that it is again putting you into a routine. Try to do something new and the mind will have less a grip on you.

Osho

Time is a created thing. To say, "I don't have time" is like saying "I don't want to.

Lau-tzu

[Neighbor is] not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

It is not enought to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Henry David Thoreau

To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Dutch fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that the blacks and whites are all children of one father, whom they call Adam. As for me, I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are.

Voltaire

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.

Erich Fromm

Do not only think about it, but feel about it, also, before taking appropriate action.

T.F. Hodge

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

Pyotr Kropotkin

The strength to move forward when others stop, to keep going when others turn back, is the key to unlocking your greatest potential.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.

Friedrich Schiller

Some choices will either make you perish or prosper, choose properly.

Gift Gugu Mona

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Susan Sontag

Luck is a word devoid of sense nothing can exist without a cause.

Voltaire

We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.

Stanisław Lem

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

William James

Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.

Aristotle

We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health.

Michel de Montaigne

A man's life is what his thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius

To evade arrogance, remind yourself (from time to time) that your talent or success could have been better. To be thankful, remind yourself (every now and then) that your illness or failure could have been worse.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed

Arthur Schopenhauer

I believe the real reason we pursue anything in life is not for the thing itself, but for who we become on the way to its accomplishment. We strive to accomplish things in the attempt to mold ourselves. The greatest benefits Jiu Jitsu will have in your life will have nothing to do with Jiu Jitsu. It is this simple understanding that allows me to persist in my study. Even on the rare days when I may not have a burning desire to practice Jiu Jitsu, I am reminded that my practicing Jiu Jitsu is more accurately my practicing to become a better human being. The lessons I learn on the mat will serve me in every area of life-- personal development, relationships, business, and the like.

Chris Matakas

So long as the anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function no moral equivalent of war analogous as one might say to the mechanical equivalent of hate so long they fail to realize the full equities of the situation.

William James

Scars are your greatest medals in life.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown.

T.F. Hodge

People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the citys walls.

Heraclitus

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