Quotes by Philosophers - Page 55

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.

Jean Vanier

Committees kill unconventional ideas for a living.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The greatest mountain is still made of grains of sand.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The spirit of arrogance most definitely makes you shine. It paints a bright red target on your own forehead.

Criss Jami

When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the bright joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that the blessing of friendship was to help each other out of a financial tight spot, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined 10 rix-dollars, that cordiality was to say ‘You’re welcome’ after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw. And I laughed.

Søren Kierkegaard

A wise man sees as much as he ought not as much as he can.

Michel de Montaigne

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, butthe tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression.Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa,have long expelled her.?Europe regards her like a stranger, and Englandhath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare intime an asylum for mankind.

Thomas Paine

There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of women that he is convinced he is in love with, or, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When we are healthy, wealthy and powerful, we forget about our mortality. It’s only when irreparable cracks set in that we come back to reality.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Alfred North Whitehead

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Ayn Rand

The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.

Immanuel Kant

Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.

Albert Camus

When man penetrates the mysteries of Nature, the "facts of Nature" become transparent symbols, revealing the "divine energies" and the "angelic" state which fallen man has lost, and which he may recover only for a moment, as when he is enraptured by the beauty of music or of a lovely face. At such moments man forgets his limited self, his individualistic dream, and participates in the cosmic dream, thus becoming freed from the prison of his own carnal soul.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

All that may be wished for, will by nature fade to nothing.

Śāntideva

A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.

Criss Jami

Lead rationally.Lead responsibly.Lead resiliently.Lead reliably.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Nature is not human-hearted.

Lao Tzu

A person who speaks like a book is exceedingly boring to listen to; sometimes, however, it is not inappropriate to talk in that way. For a book has the remarkable property that it can be interpreted any way you wish. If one talks like a book one’s conversation acquires this property too. I kept quite soberly to the usual formulas. She was surprised, as I’d expected; that can’t be denied. To describe to myself how she looked is difficult. She seemed multifaceted; yes just about like the still to be published but announced commentary to my book, a commentary capable of any interpretation. One word and she would have laughed at me; another and she would have been moved; still another and she would have shunned me; but no such word came to my lips. I remained solemnly unemotional and kept to the ritual.― ‘She had known me for such a short time’, dear God, it’s only on the strait path of engagement one meets such difficulties, not the primrose path of love.”―from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_. Abridged, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Alastair Hannay, p. 312

Søren Kierkegaard

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

Peter Kreeft

Love is the luckiest tenant in the world, living in the hearts of men and women rent free.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Today’s amateurs are tomorrow’s champions.

Matshona Dhliwayo

New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common.

John Locke

If love wasn’t conditional, every single first encounter with individuals of your 'preferred' gender would result in *love at first sight.*

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

U.G. Krishnamurti

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

Simone de Beauvoir

We fight exploitation of man by man in words but live it in daily life

Bangambiki Habyarimana

People use the words "beginning" and "end" to describe the start and end of things. However, "beginning" is really the event of coming together when energy gathers, and "end" is simply the dissolution of that energy. That which came together can easily dissolve if conditions become unfavorable. That which has dissolved may come together again if circumstances are appropriate. Therefore, who is to say that there is a beginning and an end?

Liezi

Disappointments are to the soul what a thunder-storm is to the air.

Friedrich von Schiller

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').

Alexander Nehamas

The fact that you have just buried your parent or parents and/or sibling or siblings does not make you less likely to die today.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A diamond is just a rock that refused to break under heat and pressure.

Matshona Dhliwayo

It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…

William James

If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still."And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.

Dante Alighieri

If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.

Chris Matakas

You don't need to kill with a sword, the tongue can do equally a better job and police will not knock on your door

Bangambiki Habyarimana

[O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist ence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the'subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people). In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept that its violence is merely a matter of contin gent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic reforms).

Slavoj Žižek

Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.

Augustine of Hippo

We use our minds in a way similar to how we use a scale - it tells us its worth, its value. But what if the scale has not been accurately recalibrated to zero? What if you had forgotten to remove mental and emotional baggage?

Ilchi Lee

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

George Santayana

God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.

Thomas Aquinas

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.

William James

In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called ‘astrology.’ But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.

Robert P. Crease

Not every single way of saying the right thing is right.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Before letting someone hold your heart in their hands, make sure their hands are clean.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.

Dante Alighieri

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Aldous Huxley

Our highest deeds come from helping the lowest people.

Matshona Dhliwayo

No one could ever meet death for his country without the hope of immortality.

Cicero

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Edmund Burke

As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won’t have to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries – the chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.... If you could pass through it without losing your consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, ”whatever misery I have created, I’ll go through it, I’ll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered any misery – I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain, or sorrow.

Osho

Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

William James

When we quarrel how we wish we had been blameless.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

Mary Astell

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

Susan Sontag

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