Quotes by Philosophers - Page 69

Simone de Beauvoir

...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.

Mary Wollstonecraft

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

Iris Murdoch

In the midst of darkness, he alone sees the dawn; in the midst of the soundless, he alone hears harmony.

Zhuangzi

Great tests precede great blessings.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.

Erich Fromm

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

G.K. Chesterton

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

Plato

Your mind shines brightest when you enlighten others; your heart, when you encourage others; your soul, when you elevate others; and your life, when you empower others.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.

José Ortega y Gasset

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

Susan Sontag

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar andperhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.

Alan W. Watts

I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life

Hélène Cixous

To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

Aristotle

To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.

Sam Harris

Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Immanuel Kant

The day you leave, this will be your only contentment: if you have made the existence a little more beautiful.

Osho

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist"from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

Friedrich Nietzsche

Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?" "Certainly," he replied. "Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?

Plato

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

Alan W. Watts

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

Muhammad Iqbal

A mighty storm is inconsequential when facing a mighty ship.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I choose many voices to consider and reckon with, rather than just one to tolerate.

T.F. Hodge

Seeing everything that goes on in your daily life, your daily activities - when you pick up a pen, when you talk, when you go out for a drive or when you are walking alone in the woods - can you with one breath, with one look, know yourself very simply as you are? When you know yourself as you are, then you understand the whole structure of man's endeavour, his deceptions, his hypocrisies, his search. To do this you must be tremendously honest with yourself throughout your being.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Intense, sustained focus fuels manifestation.

T.F. Hodge

While stabbing someones back, you recklessly expose your own.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

Peter Singer

I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I'm always talking to God about whether or not he exists - that's how I know I'm a theist.

Criss Jami

Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

They only let us live in millions for the sake of the economy. I don't know what will happen by the time they figure out how to run the economy without the people

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

G.K. Chesterton

The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering from positive evil.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.

Alan W. Watts

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much

Blaise Pascal

It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

Ayn Rand

The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.

Sam Harris

All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.

Seneca

you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings ofHecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That wasindeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

Seneca

One of the great constants in life is change.

Heracleitus

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.

Michel Foucault

To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.

Truman G. Madsen

Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The best way to predict your success is to work for it.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.

Albert Camus

Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture.

Criss Jami

Ego and pride is a two headed twist.

T.F. Hodge

Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

Isaiah Berlin

Promoting what you don't like, invites more of it to your doorstep. Beat the right drum. ~T.F. Hodge

T.F. Hodge

Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus

Stefan Molyneux

Blossoms shower, and then they go on showering—they never stop. The blossoms that showered for Buddha are still showering. The blossoms that showered for Subhuti are still showering.

Osho

The heart carries heavy loads when it is being trained to carry weighty blessings.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Depression is rage spread thin.

George Santayana

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Divorce fear. Court courage. Pursue hope. Marry love.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

Ayn Rand

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