Quotes by Philosophers - Page 66

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

Simone de Beauvoir

The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.

Ivan Illich

It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.

Albert Camus

It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.

Ayn Rand

Now I am about to take my last voyage a great leap in the dark.

Thomas Hobbes

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

Jacques Maritain

Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.

A.C. Grayling

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sadly enough, some people are insecure in such a way that they cannot bear the thought of the sovereignty of God, the thought of His Being as greater than themselves. It makes them feel insignificant. But I know if I were to worship and obey anything, I would like it far greater than myself or any person or human system, preferably to the point that which it, perhaps, in all its majesty, makes me feel lost and even 'creatural' in my sheer humanity. Only this God - He who is great beyond human measure, yet still considers His creation precious - I find to be more than worthy of praise; otherwise, I bow down and worship nothing. And if the thought of such a superior and almighty God were to indeed offend me, I would have to remember that it is because I am only as significant as the things which I am idolizing, things which are ultimately separating me, the creation, from my original Creator.

Criss Jami

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Walter Benjamin

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Wisdom frees men, even if they are in prison.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Purity both of the body and the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God's grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person.

Augustine of Hippo

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

…I am left with lessthan one drop of my blood that does not tremble.I recognize the the signs of the old flame.

Dante Alighieri

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Immanuel Kant

Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.

Seneca

Nothing closes doors as quickly as constant bad humor, reclamation, whining. Nobody wants to associate themselves with losers.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The poorest man you can marry is not the one who lacks money, but the one who lacks character.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Never having been able to succeed in the world he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

Voltaire

The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.

Edmund Burke

A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.

Henry David Thoreau

Ordinary people are products of their environment. Extraordinary people make their environments products of them.

Matshona Dhliwayo

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

Henry David Thoreau

I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

Georges Bataille

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death.

Bertrand Russell

‎"...θα πρέπει να αντιληφθείς, αγαπητή Τερέζα, ότι τα αντικείμενα δεν έχουν, κατά την άποψη μας, άλλη αξία από εκείνη που τους δίνει η φαντασία μας

Marquis de Sade

When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.

Alan W. Watts

Wise people do not claim to know it all, they always choose to learn from others.

Gift Gugu Mona

The angry person is acutely sensitive to all they are owed by the world, and blind to all they have received

Jules Evans

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich A. Hayek

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

G.K. Chesterton

If you want to rise, drop everyone that is weighing you down.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.

Charles Eisenstein

If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.

Jeremy Bentham

They hate you not because of what you have done but because of who you are; you are different from who they are, and you are occupying the ground they want for themselves.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

William James

Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

Henry David Thoreau

Fear is the start of wisdom.

Miguel de Unamuno

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Robert M. Pirsig

The Christian who loves his Master needs not fear any longer for himself. For it is then completely irrational, as it is written thus: 'Perfect love casts out fear.' However, it is very much rational for one to instead fear for the enemies of God.

Criss Jami

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

George Santayana

Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

Nicola Abbagnano

As to the roaming of sages,They move in utter emptiness,Let their minds meander in the great nothingness;They run beyond conventionAnd go through where there is no gateway.They listen to the soundlessAnd look at the formless,They are not constrained by societyAnd not bound to its customs.- Lao-tzu

Lao Tzu

The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.

Cornel West

Nurture a tree today, and it will provide you shade tomorrow.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The best learners are the best earners.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Speech is silvern silence is golden.

Thomas Carlyle

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

Norbert Wiener

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

Sam Harris

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.

Alain de Botton

You have two eyes,but the discerning have three.You have two ears,but the wise have four.You have two hands,but the enlightened have five.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.

Criss Jami

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Marquis de Sade

Practice yourself for heaven's sake in little things and thence proceed to greater.

Epictetus

Yesterday says, “Forget me, but learn from me.” Today says, “Embrace me, yet utilize me.”Tomorrow says, “Anticipate me, then prepare for me.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Voltaire

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