Quotes by Philosophers - Page 46

Sometimes, rather than just think about it, we need to feel about it. The intellect is limited or finite, while intuition connects to a sea of unlimited consciousness that expands far beyond time and space (as we know it).

T.F. Hodge

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause

David Hume

Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.

Mary Wollstonecraft

One is not born a genius one becomes a genius.

Simone de Beauvoir

It's utter arrogance to think that we can know what god ought to be or do. If we don't understand we must continue our search or recognize our ignorance

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Susan Sontag

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

Paulo Freire

Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits.

Ernst Cassirer

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

Slavoj Žižek

Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.

G.K. Chesterton

Apply the lie detector to everything. You will be amazed at how many lies you will discover. Beware tough, you may discover that you are a lie.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Life is the song you dance to when reality sings.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When reaching for the stars, beware of those who want to cut off your hands.

Matshona Dhliwayo

What mancan you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he isdying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Seneca

The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'.

Michel Foucault

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Susan Sontag

Life has a meaning but do not set out to find out. Just live it out.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Walter Benjamin

You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.

T.F. Hodge

The only kind of universe that I can even begin to conceive is an inconceivable one.

Ilyas Kassam

We cry when something is sad. Then we often shed a tear when something's beautiful as well. When something's funny or ugly, we laugh. Perhaps we are sad when something is beautiful because we know that it won't last for ever. Then, we start laughing when something is ugly because we understand that it's only a joke.

Jostein Gaarder

A leaf has no power to resist when the wind blows, but when life’s storms rage, you do.

Matshona Dhliwayo

...I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence; but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.

Socrates

Barley porridge, or a crust of barley bread, and water do not make a very cheerful diet, but nothing gives one keener pleasure than having the ability to derive pleasure even from that-- and the feeling of having arrived at something which one cannot be deprived of by any unjust stroke of fortune.

Seneca

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Over a billion people believe in Allah without truly knowing what Allah supposedly stands for or what he really demands of them. And the minority that do understand continue to be Moslems because they have redefined their morality and ethics to fit within the teachings of Islam, which are floridly lacking in morality. They therefore redefine what is good and evil in order to fit their lives into what is preached by Islam, instead of examining Islam to see if it fits within the good life. Backwards thinking, imposed by a backward religion.

Bertrand Russell

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

G.K. Chesterton

When we honestly take stock of our ability, we are then granted the opportunity to improve our circumstance. Accessing where you stand is the only way to stand somewhere else.

Chris Matakas

I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.

Michel de Montaigne

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility.

Sam Harris

Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.

Seneca

Love has turned many into poets; pain has turned many into artists; charity has turned many into pacifists, and anger has turned many into activists.

Matshona Dhliwayo

As for those who spite you, and seemingly just because, it's only evident that they're learning from you. Maybe you taste bad - kind of like medicine, kind of like truth - and to them, you're thought unsafe. There is flattery in being chewed out and spit up. Humans have always had a hard time digesting foreign things.

Criss Jami

No social stability without individual stability.

Aldous Huxley

Desire speaks, passion shouts, lust screams, and love whispers.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Be kind, because everyone is having a really hard time.

Plato

In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are the norm in interactions with people. The approval and disapproval of others become important, and the honest and sincere expression of thoughts and feelings is lost.

Liezi

A specialist’s mind is a slave to his specialization.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Language is fossil Poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is impossible to make your own luck without the ingredient of hard work.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.

Aldous Huxley

Endeavor to create heaven on earth and turn your heart into the new Jerusalem

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The sensation of energy expands with increasing relaxation.

Ilchi Lee

By the time a fool learns how to hold a spear, the lion has eaten him.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)—a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature’s whims.

Slavoj Žižek

Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The wise man who has become accustomed to necessities knows better how to share with others than how to take from them, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.

Epicurus

To a fireman, wind is a curse. To a sailor, wind is a blessing.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Expand your mind. Nurture your heart. Develop your body. Cultivate your soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

O temporal O mores! O what times! what morals!

Cicero

...properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic.

Robert Flint

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Novalis

Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.

Plato

We have to serve ourself many years before we gain our own confidence.

Henry S. Haskins

Anger is a brief madness.

Horace

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.

Slavoj Žižek

Be willing to have it so acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

William James

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

Abraham J. Heschel

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