Quotes by Philosophers - Page 52

In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

Arthur Schopenhauer

To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty.

José Ortega y Gasset

The final reward of the dead - to die no more

Friedrich Nietzsche

What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?

Ayn Rand

For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.

Nel Noddings

The best remedy for people who have become your headache is to take a 'chill pill' from your willingness to endure their misery.

T.F. Hodge

To love without need or without expectation of restitution, that is how we ought to love.

Criss Jami

Anything does not exist until it is created. You create it

Bangambiki Habyarimana

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are aﬀected in the ﬁrst place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simpliﬁed, being reduced to four andsoon to two colours; ﬁnally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identiﬁable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions ‘the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deﬁciency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less diﬀerentiated and more primitive structure’.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I think that we have to create in ourselves, through critical analysis of our practice, some qualities, some virtues as educators. One of them, for example, is the quality of becoming more and more open to feel the feelings of others, to become so sensitive that we can guess what the group or one person is thinking at that moment.

Paolo Freire

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Michel de Montaigne

Every country has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.

John Cage

When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife.

G.K. Chesterton

Curiosity is a lust of the mind.

Thomas Hobbes

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Joseph de Maistre

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Albert Camus

Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.

Alain de Botton

Nothing in nature happens voluntarily. Everything is forced to happen. There is a hidden hand that forces things to move.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.

Plato

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.

Søren Kierkegaard

I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on.

Ayn Rand

Happiness is a temporary recurring human experience.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Marshall McLuhan

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.

Eric Hoffer

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

Sam Harris

Not everyone who condemns masturbation can masturbate.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Man conquers the world by conquering himself.

Zeno of Citium

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

G.K. Chesterton

f you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.

Seneca

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In whatever we do, we should be investing in ourselves and not our jobs. Everything I have ever pursued has been for the sole goal of who I was becoming in its achievement. I competed and fought because of the man I became. This is the only worthwhile victory. You cannot take the trophies with you.

Chris Matakas

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.

William Barrett

Perhaps a seemingly dull, boring person is not a person who lacks personality, but rather a person with so much personality most other things bore them.

Criss Jami

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

Plato

Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.

Socrates

Malice drinks one-half of its own poison.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood.

John Ruskin

Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.

Guy Debord

You only need four words to spell the greatest word in the universe: L.O.V.E.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. I'm looking for a forty-hour day.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul

Socrates

Your greatest friendships are those that survive the greatest storms.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Another basic characteristic of liberalism which constitutes a formidable obstacle to an oppressed group's liberation is its conception of human nature. If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate, really are among defining human traits, as every liberal philosopher since Locke tries to convince us, the oppression in civil society—i.e. in the social sphere not regulated by the state—is a fact of life, and the basic civil relationship between a man and a women will always remain a battlefield. Woman, being less aggressive, is then either the less human of the two and doomed to subjugation, or else she must get more power-hungry herself and try to dominate man. Liberation for both is not feasible.

Mihailo Markovic

If you have no competition there's no need to debate.

T.F. Hodge

What can we do without pain in front of happiness?

Sorin Cerin

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.

Robert M. Pirsig

She who has the excellence of home virtues, and can expend within the means of her husband, is a help in the domestic state

Thiruvalluvar

To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

Ayn Rand

Success produces success just as money produces money.

Nicolas de Chamfort

All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

Ayn Rand

The never-ending task of self improvement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Neel Burton

From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.

Judith Butler

And since the portions of both the large and the small are equal in amount, in this way too all things would be in everything; nor can they be separate, but all things have a portion of everything. Since there cannot be a smallest, nothing can be separated or come to be by itself, but as in the beginning now too all things are together. But in all things there are many things, equal in amount, both in the larger and the smaller of the things being separated off.

Anaxagoras

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