Quotes by Philosophers - Page 43

You cannot marry your past without divorcing your future.

Matshona Dhliwayo

There is no business in the world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.

Jean de La Bruyère

In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves.

Krishnamurti

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.

G.K. Chesterton

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.

Aldous Huxley

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture,an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours.

Ayn Rand

Growing up is childish.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams and fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let's in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality.

Robert Musil

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.

Immanuel Kant

I am not sure if women are attracted to genius. Can you imagine the wise wizard winning the woman over the gallant swordsman? It seems rather otherworldly in more ways than one.

Criss Jami

Love is the politics of sex

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Each one comes to their own understanding and recognition of truth in their own time, not in yours.

T.F. Hodge

Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.

Socrates

Have the mind of a swam, the heart of a lion, the tongue of a serpent, the flair of a swam, and the soul of a dove.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

Will Durant

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil M. Cioran

Love does not dwell on how much one receives in return. If there is ever any balance in love, it is in a contest of who can love who more.

Criss Jami

Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

Rabindranath Tagore

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

True life lies in laughter, love and work.

Elbert Hubbard

The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.

Criss Jami

...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.

Søren Kierkegaard

The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.

Ayn Rand

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.

Pascal Bruckner

Perhaps not everything happens for a reason. That is, until you make it so; because for everything there is a season, which can, in fact, become beautiful.

Criss Jami

If you throw a stone into the ocean, it will reach the bottom; if you throw a word into someone’s heart, it will reach their soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Alain de Botton

One thing I know the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

Albert Camus

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public

Adam Smith

The laws of gravity work everywhere except in the heart and the soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.

Jonathan Sacks

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Bertrand Russell

He knew Kandinsky by heart: every trickle of red, slash of black ink, and hemorrhage of gold. Each dissonant note in its allegro, the harmony in its adagio, and its deep blue intermezzo, formed a symphony he had memorized in his body. He couldn’t say if Fragment 2 symbolized the Deluge, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection. But it had become his religion, offering both redemption and pain..

Kelly Oliver

I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time, not occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own; for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone's power to do the like.

Margaret Cavendish

Taqwā means to protect oneself against the harmful or evil consequences of one's conduct. If, then, by "fear of God" one means fear of the consequences of one's actions—whether in this world or the next (fear of punishment of the Last Day)—one is absolutely right. In other words, it is the fear that comes from an acute sense of responsibility, here and in the hereafter, and not the fear of a wolf or of an uncanny tyrant, for the God of the Qur’ān has unbounded mercy—although He also wields dire punishment, both in this world and in the hereafter.

Fazlur Rahman

Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.

G.K. Chesterton

People love answers, but only as long as they are the ones who came up with them.

Criss Jami

To know yourself you must know the transience of your self.

Ilyas Kassam

Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Love is loud; the soul hears it, even if the universe is deaf.

Matshona Dhliwayo

And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.

Jacques Derrida

Free is he who is reputable for not being fearful of losing his reputation.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You don't have to reach for greatness if it is already in you.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The Secret of Happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

F.H. Bradley

No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.

Jacques Ellul

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Robert M. Pirsig

Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?

Jonathan Edwards

He who is shipwrecked twice is foolish to blame the sea.

Publilius Syrus

One swallow does not make a summer,neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Aristotle

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Bertrand Russell

I am better than my reputation.

Friedrich von Schiller

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Paul Valéry

The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in.

Lao Tzu

On Epicurus; He says: "Contended poverty is an honourable estate." Indeed, if it is contented, it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Seneca

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Sam Harris

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What river can flood over the mountains of your love?

Sorin Cerin

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