Quotes by Philosophers - Page 40

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.

Charles Sanders Peirce

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?

Rebecca Goldstein

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power but for the passionate sense of the potential for the eye which ever young and ardent sees the possible ... what wine is so sparkling so fragrant so intoxicating as possibility!

Søren Kierkegaard

In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

Criss Jami

Be the spouse you wish to have.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Susan Sontag

Envy is a sign that you are being overtaken

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.

Criss Jami

He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.

Niccolò Machiavelli

All is flux

Heraclitus

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A bird that does not break out of its shell will die in its egg.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Do not underrate yourself trying to be somebody else.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The struggles of the past are the gateway to the blessings of the future.

Matshona Dhliwayo

P40- this violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.

Paulo Freire

The end toward which all human acts are directed is happiness.

Aristotle

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many consuming fires can there be in the words: freedom, peace and democracy and how easy they can be extinguished by ignorance, stupidity and arrogance?

Sorin Cerin

There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.

Augustine of Hippo

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy

Albert Camus

On the lowest level, this loss of soul turns the man into the hen-pecked husband who lives with his wife as though she were his mother upon whom he is solely dependent in all things having to do with emotions and the inner life. But even the relatively positive case where the woman is the mistress of the inner domain and mother of the home who simultaneously has the responsibility for dealing with all the man's questions and problems having to do with emotions and the inner life, even this leads to a lack of emotional vitality and sterile one-sidedness in the man. He discharges only the "outer" and "rational" affairs of life, profession, politics, etc. Owing to his loss of soul, the world he has shaped becomes a patriarchal world that, in its soullessness, presents an unprecedented danger for humanity. In this context we cannot delve further into the significance of a full development of the archetypal feminine potential for a new, future society.

Erich Neumann

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one

Voltaire

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If a man wishes to ensure the bad opinion of others, his best course probably is to be honest about himself.

William Hurrell Mallock

Let discernment be your trustee, and mistakes your teacher.

T.F. Hodge

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth.

Aldous Huxley

I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.

Rabindranath Tagore

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money.

Neel Burton

If you believe that God is good and that He loves you without regard to whom you are or what you do, you will worship Him wholeheartedly. You will praise him with thanksgiving. If you believe He is angry against you, you will come to him with fear and trying to appease his anger. And you don't know when His anger will be over. Such a god keeps you in a perpetual psychological anguish. That is the typical kind of god we usually worship. That is the typical god approved by authority.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

A bird cannot fly upward if each wing is flapping in a different direction.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Fear is unnecessary cargo when sailing to success.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Valor is stability not of legs and arms but of courage and the soul.

Michel de Montaigne

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

Aristotle

An angry enemy is a conquered enemy

Bangambiki Habyarimana

It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.

Socrates

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Women can form a friendship with a man very well but to preserve it a slight physical antipathy most probably helps.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

Alain de Botton

Even the richest of brands are robbed by poor character.

Criss Jami

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

Simone de Beauvoir

...there’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value.

Ayn Rand

The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even though God could create all kinds of things, he could hardly create himself before he had a "self" to create with. So there was only one possibility left: God had always existed. But she had already rejected that possibility! Everything that existed had to have a beginning.

Jostein Gaarder

When a honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry Frankfurt

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Thomas Carlyle

In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive “result” (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody’s “theory” of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one’s current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let’s not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let’s recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues.

Daniel Dennett

Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.

Marcus Aurelius

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity.

Ortega y Gasset

His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.

John Stuart Mill

You do not get what you wish for, unless it be known to the source of your desire.

T.F. Hodge

So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.

Seneca

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Alain de Botton

Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

The grass must bend when the wind blows across it.

Confucius

The joy you feel when you become a small life particle sun and share its brightness and warmth with those around you is indescribably great.

Ilchi Lee

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