Quotes by Philosophers - Page 58

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

Confucius

If you invest in your critics more than you invest in your dreams, you have successfully invested in your failure.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.

Stuart D.B. Picken

Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.

Baltasar Gracián

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

Ayn Rand

All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.

José Ortega y Gasset

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

Alfred North Whitehead

We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Henry David Thoreau

Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

Elbert Hubbard

Was there someone absent from the table of creation?

Sorin Cerin

We need a reason to speak but none to keep silent.

Pierre Nicole

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Alan W. Watts

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

Karl Marx

Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

Adam Smith

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

Eric Hoffer

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Walter Benjamin

I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.

Muriel Barbery

This is the answer: live moment to moment and you become a buddha.

Osho

The sense of a soul and afterlife is an intuitive illusion.

Christopher Zzenn Loren

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

John Locke

Oftentimes in reality, the genius is in the position of the antihero. Neither the good guys nor the bad guys really trust him because his truth is universal.

Criss Jami

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

G.K. Chesterton

Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me,maybe this, or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.

Erich Fromm

Both friend and enemy reside within us. One lives by the rule of compassion, the other by the rule of hard knocks. Though potential influence of either extreme is inevitable, our actions bear witness to the one we embrace.

T.F. Hodge

The beginning seems to be more than half of the whole.

Aristotle

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Thomas Carlyle

Some people are bringing the business tricks of scarcity mentality into God's mind. They will tell you that only a few will see God. Why? God's heart is infinitely huge, his arms infinitely large that all of us can have a place in him

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.

Confucius

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

William H. Gass

Embrace all. Help some. Trust few. Harm none.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility.

Ayn Rand

The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.

James Martineau

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Friedrich von Schiller

Immediately after a divorce or a breakup, your mind whispers that there are plenty more fish in the sea, while your heart shouts that there is only one whoever-you-just-divorced-or-broke-up-with.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

Aldous Huxley

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

George Steiner

I shall not assess arguments and evidence for competing views about when human extinction will occur. We know it will occur, and this fact has a curious effect on my argument. In a strange way it makes my argument an optimistic one. Although things are now not the way they should be—there are people when there should be none—things will someday be the way they should be—there will be no people. In other words, although things are now bad, they will be better, even if they first get worse with the creation of new people. Some may wish to be spared this kind of optimism, but some optimists may take a measure of comfort in this observation.

David Benatar

the marketplace is capable only of calculating exclusive costs; that is; excluding all possible costs that interfere with profit. Leadership of society requires the calculation of inclusive costs. To invoke the marketplace, as if calling upon the Holy Spirit, is to limit ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

John Ralston Saul

If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.

Denise Riley

For the Qur’ān, it is neither strange nor out of tune nor blameworthy for a prophetthat he is not always consistent as a human. It is nevertheless as a human that hebecomes an example for mankind, for his average level of conduct is still so high that it is a worthy model for mankind.

Fazlur Rahman

He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.

Zhuangzi

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

Giacomo Leopardi

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

Henry David Thoreau

There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

Matthew B. Crawford

If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

Ralph Waldo Emerson“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want a work well done select a busy man: the other kind has no time.

Elbert Hubbard

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

G.K. Chesterton

Most people, if philosophy touches them, they shatter, they atomize, they turn to dust. It is win/lose between philosophy and delusion, and most people are almost entirely composed of delusion. They're only allowed as much reality as serves the masters. But they're not allowed any reality which disturbs their masters...

Stefan Molyneux

Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.

Muriel Barbery

The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.

Aldous Huxley

Love in this life is expanded by our anticipation of the next life. Those who love under God are never satisfied with small love, or love bound by the flaws of human emotion. Those who love under God dream of another life where they can experience it and live it in God's perfect form, so they seek to build it in this life as much as possible.

Criss Jami

With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?

Marcus Aurelius

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