Quotes by Philosophers - Page 37

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.

Criss Jami

Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?

David Hume

When the nest becomes too small a bird is ready to spread its wings and fly.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Don't go into the business of pleasing people. You can't please everybody. Simply do your best at what you do

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

Sam Harris

He who conquers others is strong he who conquers himself is mighty.

Lao Tzu

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

Erich Fromm

There's more to logic than identifying logical fallacies.

Criss Jami

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Henry David Thoreau

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

Thomas Paine

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Henry David Thoreau

You don’t have to swim when you know how to walk on water.

Matshona Dhliwayo

For the wealthy, money is a tool. For the impoverished, it is the rule.

T.F. Hodge

Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary?

Socrates

The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

Do not risk your life for someone who does not care about you.

Gift Gugu Mona

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

Theodor W. Adorno

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.

Neel Burton

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

Simone Weil

We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Henry David Thoreau

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Walter Benjamin

However smart and determined you are, your life is always going to consist of light and darkness, joy and sadness, good or bad, up and down, yang and yin.

Gary Hayden

The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.

Georges Bataille

I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.

Epicurus

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

G.K. Chesterton

Give dry bread to a rich kid and he will throw it into the dustbin, give it to the poor kid and he will remember your name for the rest of his days

Bangambiki Habyarimana

True honor does not crave recognition, as true wisdom craves not publicity. The great heroes and the great men of wisdom walk silently through the bypaths of mankind.

Dagobert D. Runes

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Henry David Thoreau

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

Michel Foucault

He who has great power should use it lightly.

Seneca

It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

Voltaire

The human heart in its perversity finds it hard to escape hatred and revenge.

Moses Luzzatto

We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.

G.E. Moore

If you feed a child, you strengthen him for a day; if you educate him, you strengthen him for a lifetime.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Philosophy may be blind without science, but science can lack vision without philosophy.

Scott O'Reilly

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Simone de Beauvoir

The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.

Criss Jami

There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.

Friedrich Schiller

Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?

René Descartes

The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life—if indeed we can conceive of it. Yet we have no indication that even Jesus was constantly awash with revelations as to what he should do. His union with the Father was so great that he was at all times obedient. This obedience was something that rested in his mature will and understanding of his life before God, not on always being told “Now do this” and “Now do that” with regard to every details of his life or work.

Dallas Willard

Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.

Paul Tillich

Justice' primes the human habitat for peaceful and friendly togetherness. It sets the table - the round table - for polylogue and negotiations guided by the will of agreement. Justice is the most 'socializing' of values.

Zygmunt Bauman

No matter how deep you bury good seeds, they always find a way to rise.

Matshona Dhliwayo

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.

Peter Kreeft

Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the Seer's own form.

Patañjali

Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.

Ivan Illich

The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.

Augustine of Hippo

A mother’s eyes are like God; impossible to get away from, they see everything.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.

Albert Camus

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

G.K. Chesterton

One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

Stanisław Lem

Once the wounded child awakens to its human self, a primal scream emerges from the depths of denial like the Kraken released from its underwater prison.

Christopher Zzenn Loren

... When Princes devote themselves rather to pleasure than to arms, they lose their dominions.

Niccolò Machiavelli

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