Quotes by Authors - Page 5020

A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
B.F. Skinner
In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.
Kakuzō Okakura
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
Peter Singer
See the moon? It hates us.
Donald Barthelme
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
Matt Taibbi
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
For me, writing is immortality. It is wisdom. It is never-ending.
Al Stone
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
I believe that just because something didn’t go the way you planned it once, it’s no reason not to try again.
Chantelle Shaw
Of course there’s a risk that that could happen, but what is the alternative? To never allow myself to get close to anyone ever again? Never know the joy of loving someone for fear that it could end up in tears? My heart might stay safe, but it wouldn’t be much of a life.
Chantelle Shaw
When the road ahead seems impossible, start the engine
Benny Bellamacina
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
Søren Kierkegaard
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.
Jostein Gaarder
Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
John Green
But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
Jostein Gaarder
If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself.
Osho
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
Norman Maclean
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Norman Maclean
True, life is complex. But so are a great many accidents.
Foz Meadows
Life is a complexwith real and imaginary parts
Angela Suba
The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.
Felix Alba-Juez
God created philosophy for all the intellects that got bored of hearing the same bible stories every Sunday.
Shannon L. Alder
We co-create our reality with others in unseen ways.
Doug Dillon
Пустинните бурени оцеляват, а пролетното цвете разцъфва и повяхва.
Khaled Hosseini
Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.
Felix Alba-Juez
Never let your uniqueness be compromised
Benny Bellamacina
In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Steve Maraboli
Such Excessive Preoccupation With The Faults Of Others Only Manages To Bring The Spotlight To Shine Bright On Whatever It Is You May Have Hiding Behind All Your Self Perceived Glory.
Marcie Leeper
I Take Life Very Seriously: One Joke At A Time.
Sandra Chami Kassis
You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.
James Thurber
♫ I learned a lesson today: never judge a person by the way they act, nor how they dress, or the way they have their disabilities. Because everyone on Earth suffers the same hell, whether in love or hate, life or death.
Nandanie Phalgoo
Free your mind from routine, keep your brain somewhere else
Benny Bellamacina
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
Virginia Woolf
What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
Peter Watts
When your tears become invisible, disappear
Benny Bellamacina
If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don't need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don't need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it, from them; and the way things have been going, we're not sure we'll be able to give it back to them in decent shape. And who are our children, actually? They are us, because they are our own continuation. So we've been shortchanging our own selves. Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we loser. That's why it's critical that we wake up and see we don't need to do that anymore. What's already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviors of our species. We need a collective awakening. One Buddha is not enough. All of us have to become Buddhas in order for our planet to have a chance. Fortunately, we have the power to wake up, to touch enlightenment from moment to moment, in our very own ordinary and, yes, busy lives. So let's start right now. Peace is your every breath.
Thich Nhat Hanh
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
Lysander Spooner
We have negative mental habits that come up over and over again. One of the most significant negative habits we should be aware of is that of constantly allowing our mind to run off into the future. Perhaps we got this from our parents. Carried away by our worries, we're unable to live fully and happily in the present. Deep down, we believe we can't really be happy just yet—that we still have a few more boxes to be checked off before we can really enjoy life. We speculate, dream, strategize, and plan for these "conditions of happiness" we want to have in the future; and we continually chase after that future, even while we sleep. We may have fears about the future because we don't know how it's going to turn out, and these worries and anxieties keep us from enjoying being here now.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Il y a les sachants et les savants: c'est la mémoire qui fait les uns, c'est la philosophie qui fait les autres. La philosophie ne s'apprend pas; la philosophie est la réunion des sciences acquises au génie qui les applique.
Alexandre Dumas
There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law of following good and shunning evil? Obviously, mankind. But then that is a dangerous thing, for if a man does not believe in a god capable of giving perfect laws, he is in the position of declaring all laws come from man, and as man is imperfect, he can declare that as fallible men make imperfect laws, he can pick and choose what he wishes to follow, that which, in his own mind seems good. He does not believe in divine retribution, therefore he can also declare his own morality contrary to what the divine may decree simply because he believes there is no divine decree. He may follow his every whim and passion, declaring it to be good when it may be very evil, for he like all men is imperfect, so how can he tell what is verily good? The atheist is in danger of mistaking vice for good and consequently follow another slave master and tyrant, his own physical and mental weakness. Evil would be wittingly or unwittingly perpetrated, therefore, to recognise the existence of a perfect divine being that gives perfect Universal Laws is much better than not to believe in a god, for if there is a perfect god, they will not allow their laws to be broken with impunity as in the case with many corrupt judges on earth, but will punish accordingly in due time. Therefore, to be pious and reverent is the surest path to true freedom as a perfect god will give perfect laws to prevent all manner of slavery, tyranny and moral wantonness, even if we do not understand why they are good laws at times.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Let people be the pursuits of happiness, you be the pursuit of perfection.
Amit Kalantri
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.
David Foster Wallace
This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.
Stephen Batchelor
Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.
E.M. Forster
A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
Erich Maria Remarque
Do you not think that God will protect us?”“No,” he said flatly. “My experience is that He rarely attends to the obvious.
Philippa Gregory
This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief --like a whisper of wind--when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.
Edward Abbey
Entertainment is temporary happiness, but the real happiness is permanent entertainment.
Amit Kalantri
The most unlucky generation is the one which couldn't produce a hero to look upto.
Amit Kalantri
Any person who, with all the sincerity of heart, is in search for God, on land or in the sea, is worthy of respect.
Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi
Nobody wants to believe that existence carries on without at least taking a stumble from their departure of this world.
Nenia Campbell
It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about.
Criss Jami
To be, or not to be: what a question!
E.A. Bucchianeri
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
Leo Tolstoy
There are situations in life which are beyond one. The sensible man realizes this, and slides out of such situations, admitting himself beaten. Others try to grapple with them, but it never does any good. When affairs get in a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his arm-chair. One's attitude towards Life's Little Difficulties should be that of the gentleman in the fable, who sat down on an acorn one day and happened to doze. The warmth of his body caused the acorn to germinate, and it grew so rapidly that, when he awoke, he found himself sitting in the fork of an oak sixty feet from the ground. He thought he would go home, but, finding this impossible, he altered his plans. "Well, well," he said, "if I cannot compel circumstances to my will, I can at least adapt my will to circumstances. I decide to remain here." Which he did, and had a not unpleasant time. The oak lacked some of the comforts of home, but the air was splendid and the view excellent.Today's Great Thought for Young Readers. Imitate this man.
P.G. Wodehouse
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give values to survival.
Alice Duer Miller
Be a worthy worker and work will come.
Amit Kalantri
For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.
Criss Jami