Quotes by Philosophers - Page 38

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Susan Sontag

Blessed is he who believes in the illusion because thus he can find his great truth!

Sorin Cerin

But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.

Francis Bacon

Rain drops are not the ones who bring the clouds.

Sorin Cerin

Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.

Simone de Beauvoir

Although it's good to have talent, character is so much important because bad character is an enemy of great talent.

Gift Gugu Mona

What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!

Aldous Huxley

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

G.K. Chesterton

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

Henry David Thoreau

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Aldous Huxley

A community is nothing else than a harmonious collection of individuals.

Augustine of Hippo

Light the candle of success with the flame of excellence.

Matshona Dhliwayo

... Desire baffles knowledge and power.

Jean-François Lyotard

Do not fixate on the odds against you but on victory ahead of you.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Voltaire

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

Arthur Schopenhauer

You can be happy indeed if you have breathing space from pain.

Giacomo Leopardi

Greed is the seed of corruptionas much as virtue is the seed of justice.Wisdom is the seed of successas much as vice is the seed of destruction.

Matshona Dhliwayo

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

Pythagoras

Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they’re short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It’s defeatist and demoralising.

Christina Hoff Sommers

No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

Baruch Spinoza

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs...are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change.

Erich Fromm

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

Socrates

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command

Niccolò Machiavelli

If you are surprised at the number of our maladies count our cooks.

Seneca

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

G.K. Chesterton

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished?

Francis Bacon

If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself.

Osho

...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.

Ernst Cassirer

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.

Ayn Rand

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

Aldous Huxley

Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?

Slavoj Žižek

To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama; you can participate in it, but then you don’t take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But don’t take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.

Osho

Do not show your wounded finger for everything will knock up against it.

Baltasar Gracián

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

Bertrand Russell

Real education changes you on the inside.

Edward Mooney

Knowledge is power, as some say. But on some days it is just as much pain and confusion as it is power; and any wise man worth his salt as a wise man at least understands this. One may be able to comprehend all the human perspectives in the universe, but this gives more to decipher regarding what is actually true; and even after discovering the truth, the challenge is in maintaining a patience for the infinite number of opinions that do not reflect that truth. Its consistency in man is challenge. A worldly knowledge ends at the former challenge of confusion, but the knowledge of Christ ends at the latter challenge of patience.

Criss Jami

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Slavoj Žižek

The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term “method” must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our power to name ourselves, the world or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue- a fact inadvertently admitted in the genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the women. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate.

Mary Daly

Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food.

Jonathan Wolff

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

Umberto Eco

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Will Durant

God hides treasure in dirt, so that only those humble enough to dig through it find it.

Matshona Dhliwayo

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

Alasdair MacIntyre

In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force

Frantz Fanon

In the body is tremendous strength, in the mind is brilliant potential, in the heart is extraordinary influence, and in the soul is remarkable power.

Matshona Dhliwayo

It is better to be a lion for one day than a wolf for a lifetime.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If you play games with the law of non-contradiction, then every time you open your mouth and say anything, you're cheating. Every time you make a choice in life you're cheating.

Ronald H. Nash

God sometimes uses ugly vessels to carry beautiful things.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I never really grew up until I had kids.

Stefan Molyneux

The greatest among you are those with the greatest love.The richest among you are those with the most joy.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I thought it was love. No, it wasn't. It was marriage

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

Hélène Cixous

The greatest gift you can give to someone is your heart; because when you give your heart, you are giving your most prized possession.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Their doubt is your fuel for dreams. You just have to drive.

Criss Jami

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

Alain de Botton

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