Quotes by Philosophers - Page 30

Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted

G.K. Chesterton

There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A book is the only vehicle that can take you around the world in one hour.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Keeping hatred against someone is like helping him to torture you

Bangambiki Habyarimana

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

Hannah Arendt

Honour, like insult, comes from others. It is their recognition of our worth. It is the intrusion of the social into the psychological, the public into the private. After all, others honour us for what they find of worth in us. ‘To pursue [honour],’ wrote Baruch Spinoza in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677), ‘we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding, fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they commonly seek.’ So what we come to think of as worthwhile in ourselves is bound to have as a large component what others think to be worthwhile in us.

C. D. C. Reeve

All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.

Blaise Pascal

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Umberto Eco

Life is existence with meaning

Bangambiki Habyarimana

for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.

Plato

When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it; for if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?

Epictetus

The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.

Plato

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.

Ayn Rand

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.

G.K. Chesterton

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on any other than an altruistic basis... If our work is to retain any meaning it can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those who will come after us.

Max Weber

Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.

Thomas Paine

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

Ian Hacking

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

Diogenes of Sinope

Entrepreneurship is the use of self-interest in the service of others. Politics is the use of others in the service of self-interest.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Excuses will become self-refuting. No man who does not believe that Jesus is the perfect, sinless Son of God can, in his desperation and love for sin, reasonably use and misconstrue Jesus' words that unless a Christian is perfect, then that Christian cannot judge sin. Otherwise this non-believer is unconsciously entertaining a belief that Jesus, unlike any other man to ever live, was indeed perfect and sinless in His judgments and therefore that Christian is supposed to be like Him.

Criss Jami

It is the best investment to make an impact on others, because even when you're dead money alone will not bury you.

Gift Gugu Mona

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The poorest people sometimes have the richest minds.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.

Bertrand Russell

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.

Boethius

It's all talk til it's all real walk.

T.F. Hodge

How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?

Simone de Beauvoir

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.

Hermann Weyl

P29 - the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.

Paulo Freire

It is at the edge of intelligence that wisdom awaits.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace making the best of circumstances.

Aristotle

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Socrates

Stop thinking, and end your problems.

Lao Tzu

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

Psychology is the science of mental life

William James

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)

Michel de Montaigne

He alone is a man who keeps his word:Not that he has one thing in the heart, and another on the tongue.

Guru Gobind Singh

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

All the known world excepting only savage nations is governed by books.

Voltaire

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Simone de Beauvoir

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

John Ruskin

I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.

Aldous Huxley

He who searches for evil, must first look at his own reflection.

Confucius

The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.

Max Horkheimer

Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulders...

Henry David Thoreau

Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizu. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?"Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter."Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.

Zhuangzi

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Noam Chomsky

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire

Those who commit suicide, pensive, lonely, philosophers, are awake in life, which is a serious crime. In life everybody must be asleep.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.

Criss Jami

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Aristotle

Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it; ... in thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything depends on opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.

Seneca

The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy

Gregory B. Sadler

Whenever I feel like exercise I lie down until the feeling passes.

Robert M. Hutchins

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