Quotes by Philosophers - Page 73

The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You do not have to have the best of everything to make the best of everything.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The tree that stands to the tempest is strong;the tree that refuses to bend, the strongest.

Matshona Dhliwayo

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.

Socrates

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Theodor W. Adorno

Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.

Seneca

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

Emil M. Cioran

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Umberto Eco

Before Venus, censorious; before Mars, timid.

Michael Walzer

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.

Muriel Barbery

If the world stands in between a man and the woman he loves, he will set out to conquer it.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Friends are family members we have a choice over.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Giacomo Leopardi

When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.

Antonin Sertillanges

Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!

Carl William Brown

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

William James

There is peace where mind and heart agree.

T.F. Hodge

We are force-fed beliefs through incessant advertisements by a culture that ceaselessly fosters our conformity to values which are of no service to the individual.

Chris Matakas

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

Henry David Thoreau

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.

Russ Shafer-Landau

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.

Thomas Paine

How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof.

Cornelius Van Til

Allow yourself to think only those thoughts that match your principles and can bear the bright light of day. Day by day, your choices, your thoughts, your actions fashion the person you become. Your integrity determines your destiny.

Heraclitus

A beautiful face cannot hide an ugly heart for long.

Matshona Dhliwayo

It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.

Seneca

Happiness does not come from having much, but from being content, even when you have little.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves

Jostien Gaarder

If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.

Giordano Bruno

Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.

Robert M. Pirsig

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.Quoted in The Situationists and the City, pg. 194

Friedrich Engels

It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a “change of terrain.” It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the “change of terrain” is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.

Jacques Derrida

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

Muriel Barbery

Victory - a matter of staying power.

Elbert Hubbard

Nothing amuses people more than a cocky guy who starts losing.

Criss Jami

In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived.

Michel de Montaigne

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.

Maimonides

O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.

Albert Schweitzer

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

Baruch Spinoza

If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt.

Marcus Aurelius

The great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius

Remember, truth cannot be conquered. One has to surrender to truth, one has to be conquered by truth.

Osho

The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.

Kedar Joshi

I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.

Jostein Gaarder

The Spirit Tower has its guardian, but unless it understands who its guardian is, it cannot be guarded.

Zhuangzi

But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it's hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.

Jostein Gaarder

You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—

Ayn Rand

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Boethius

The universe acknowledges the value of your tears; for when it rains, it is shedding its own.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.

Hannah Arendt

If the grass is greener on the other side, start watering your own.

Matshona Dhliwayo

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

Simone de Beauvoir

Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).

Franco Bifo Berardi

It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.

Arthur Schopenhauer

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

Michel de Montaigne

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

Sam Harris

Previous 1 … 71 72 73 74 75 … 79 Next