Quotes by Philosophers - Page 3

One who has great faith has great power.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.

Michel de Montaigne

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. -Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher and writer (1864-1936)

Miguel de Unamuno

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

John Stuart Mill

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.

G.K. Chesterton

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!

Thomas Carlyle

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee

I am the way into the city of woe,I am the way into eternal pain,I am the way to go among the lost.Justice caused my high architect to move,Divine omnipotence created me,The highest wisdom, and the primal love.Before me there were no created thingsBut those that last forever—as do I.Abandon all hope you who enter here.

Dante Alighieri

Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire

The true soldier fights

G.K. Chesterton

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

Blaise Pascal

Marry someone you can live with, and you have found your companion; marry someone you can’t live without, and you have found your soulmate.

Matshona Dhliwayo

There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If virtue were its own reward it would no longer be a human quality but supernatural.

Vauvenargues

The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.

Michel de Montaigne

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

Publilius Syrus

A man dies as often as he loses his friends.

Francis Bacon

No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.

John Ruskin

Thinking is like loving and dying - each of us must do it for himself.

Josiah Royce

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Henry David Thoreau

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

John Stuart Mill

You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.

Mortimer J. Adler

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Sam Harris

No matter how rich you can ever be! The greatest wealth is in loving yourself and fulfilling your God-Given purpose on earth.

Gift Gugu Mona

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane of he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.

Alfred Korzybski

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?

Marcus Aurelius

Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism

Max Scheler

The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.

Frantz Fanon

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

John Cowper Powys

Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year for it is wrong to add fire to fire.

Plato

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you look at their intentions, examine their motives, and scrutinize what brings them contentment – how can people hide who they are? How can they hide who they really are?

Confucius

Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.

Ayn Rand

The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.

Alain de Botton

To see what is right and not do it is want of courage.

Confucius

With wisdom in your mind,you can perform great deeds.With faith in your heart,you can perform extraordinary deeds.With love in your soul,you can perform remarkable deeds.With God in your life,you can perform supernatural deeds.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars

Simone de Beauvoir

religion is no longer the opium of the people but the vitamin pills of the feeble.

Régis Debray

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

Albert Camus

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

Patricia Churchland

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.

Confucius

The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding; in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is only through silence that truth can be said, because it is only through silence that the truth is heard.

Osho

One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.

Criss Jami

Owing to ignorance of the rope the rope appears to be a snake; owing to ignorance of the Self the transient state arises of the individualized, limited, phenomenal aspect of the Self.

Guru Nanak

The material universe exists only in the mind.

Jonathan Edwards

Man's best support is a very dear friend.

Cicero

The question is whether suicide is the way out or the way in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

G.K. Chesterton

The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.

Elbert Hubbard

It’s quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education.

Umberto Eco

As the sky is too big for two stars to clash, the world is big enough for all of us to shine.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

Rebecca Goldstein

Don't forget to love yourself.

Søren Kierkegaard

...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.

Ayn Rand

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome stubbornness is stupid.

Simone de Beauvoir

A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.

Niccolò Machiavelli

We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.

Nelson Goodman

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