Quotes by Philosophers - Page 65

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Bertrand Russell

It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

David Pearce

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Albert Camus

Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

Iris Murdoch

We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.

Peter Singer

Art as far as it is able follows nature as a pupil imitates his master thus your art must be as it were God's grandchild.

Dante Alighieri

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

G.K. Chesterton

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Aldous Huxley

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

Noam Chomsky

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.

Michael Oakeshott

Many receive advice only the wise profit by it.

Syrus

Diyar-e-Ishq Mein Apna Maqam Paida Kar,Naya Zamana, Naye Subah-o-Sham Paida Kar;Khuda Agar Dil-e-Fitrat Shanas De Tujh Ko,Sakoot-e-Lala-o-Gul Se Kalaam Paida Kar;Mera Tareeq Ameeri Nahin, Faqeeri Hai,Khudi Na Baich, Ghareebi Mein Naam Paida KarBuild in love’s empire your hearth and your home;Build Time anew, a new dawn, a new eve!Your speech, if God give you the friendship of Nature,From the rose and tulip’s long silence weaveThe way of the hermit, not fortune, is mine;Sell not your soul! In a beggar’s rags shine.

Muhammad Iqbal

Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on learning, who brought about its rebirth among us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

See more than your eyes can see.Hear more than your ears can hear.Do more than your hands can do.Go further than your feet can go.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Even if dogma has a purpose, it can never function as a substitute for faith, only as a dry aspect of it.

Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

Criss Jami

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.

Aldous Huxley

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The pagan, or rational, virtues are such things as justice and temperance, and Christianity has adopted them. The three mystical virtues which Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are faith, hope and charity. Now… the first evident fact, I say, is that the pagan virtues, such as justice and temperance, are the sad virtues, and that the mystical virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the gay and exuberant virtues. And the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the fact that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and that the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be…charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

G.K. Chesterton

The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks.Moreover, it speaks of everything.

Cornelius Van Til

The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.

Ivan Illich

Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.

Pythagoras

Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

the evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear

Ayn Rand

Every revolution starts with the aim to help the poor, but when the poor get it they forget who they were and become the new oppressors. The cycle goes on forever

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

Albert Camus

Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.

Alvin Plantinga

Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Time is a part of eternity and of the same piece with it.

Moses Mendelssohn

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.

Alain de Botton

The path to paradise begins in hell.

Dante Alighieri

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way.

Joseph McCabe

A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.

Michel de Montaigne

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Marcus Aurelius

It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.

Friedrich A. Hayek

We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

For the "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie.

Ayn Rand

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine

Adam Smith

The ordinary think inside of the box, the extraordinary think outside of the box, but genius thinks inside, outside, below and above the box.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The companion of patience is silence.

T.F. Hodge

Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed or exempt from danger.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Karl Marx

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Henry David Thoreau

The Epistle of our being is written with letters full of blood drained from the love of God's Word.

Sorin Cerin

Take full account of what Excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.

Marcus Aurelius

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

The world is like a brute beast, you teach it how it should behave towards you

Bangambiki Habyarimana

It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate.

Criss Jami

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

Luc Ferry

If death blew a trumpet each time he was coming, there would be no one to greet him on arrival.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Some people start to live when they die

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several he will fail to achieve distinction in any.

Plato

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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