Quotes by Philosophers

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.
Noam Chomsky
We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.
Mario Bunge
All know the way few actually walk it.
Bodhidharma
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance arms us with terrible freedom so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge yet not the details but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful manly part or a poor drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions they have a substantial truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Superiority is always detested.
Baltasar Gracián
The heaven of the envied is hell for the envious.
Baltasar Gracián
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Eric Hoffer
Success generally depends upon knowing how long it takes to succeed.
Charles de Montesquieu
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
G.K. Chesterton
When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't.
Nicolas Chamfort
He who makes fun of a short and fat man’s weight is much less cruel than he who makes fun of his height.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Marshall McLuhan
Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Our thoughts shape how we behave.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Haste denies all acts their dignity.
Dante Alighieri
The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.
Cornel West
Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.
Bertrand Russell
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that while they are always talking of things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is. A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.
G.K. Chesterton
The best way to destroy your enemies is to make them adopt your worldview
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some enemies are part and parcel of our lives, we cannot destroy them without risking our own survival
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you look at your average contemporary person, the potential for tragedy is immense. The people and things we love and value are strewn across the globe. Any number of health disasters can befall you or them.The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for confabulation and self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.
William Hirstein
Its ok to be different, the climate is not the same in every mind
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't ask for a girl's hand in marriage and forget to ask for her leg too.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value.
Jean Baudrillard
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
Albert Camus
There are no mineral monsters.
Canguilhem
We can lose the roll, we can lose position, but we can constantly strive to win the moment.
Chris Matakas
...certain people have good, ordinary blood and others have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly.
Seneca
Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can't see when we're in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection, and that we are making this projection to justify ourselves in self-betrayal. We cannot see that it's not others' actions but our accusations that result in our feeling offended.
C. Terry Warner
Man's only hope lies in "final redemption from the misery of volition and existence into the painlessness of non-being and non-willing." No mortal may quit the task of life, but each must do his part to hasten the time when in the major portion of the human race the activity of the unconscious shall be ruled by intelligence, and this stage reached, in the simultaneous action of many persons volition will resolve upon its own non-continuance, and thus idea and will be once more reunited in the Absolute.
Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann
There is no one who is completely evil as to lack some goodness in him.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Only the weak hit the fly with a hammer
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.
Roger Scruton
Thou shalt not tweet to be retweeted.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thou shalt not unfollow someone, merely because they stopped following you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thou shalt not follow someone, merely because they are following you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system
Sebastian Marincolo
Being thankful for and celebrating what is attracts more of what can and will be.
T.F. Hodge
Everybody comes with prejudices, colored glasses on their eyes. Then they see everything colored according to their glasses. Yes, a few people come just like you, unprejudiced, without any idea gathered from yellow journalism.
Osho
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau
In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Planning is worrying based on facts
Bangambiki Habyarimana
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
Geoffrey Chaucer
Fulfilled desires, like pleasures (even of the intrinsic kind), are states of achievement rather than default states. For instance, one has to work at satiating oneself, while hunger comes naturally. After one has eaten or taken liquid, bowel and bladder discomfort ensues quite naturally and we have to seek relief. One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving. Pollyannaism may cause most people to blur out this background, but it remains there.
David Benatar
No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.
Emil M. Cioran
Reciprocal marketing, promotions and links. In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance of reciprocity in social situations.
Carl William Brown
It used to be said "Build it and they will come," now it is "Build it and bribe them in".
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you cheat on reason with emotion you will go bankrupt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
Alain de Botton
The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.
Karl Marx
You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.
T.F. Hodge
An angry enemy is a conquered enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Gods are always ready, their hands are always full with flowers. They simply watch and wait. Whenever somebody becomes a Subhuti, empty, whenever somebody is absent, suddenly the flowers start showering.
Osho
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
G.K. Chesterton
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Mircea Eliade
A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dear Hunger Games :Screw you for helping cowards pretend you have to be great with a bow to fight evil.You don't need to be drafted into a monkey-infested jungle to fight evil.You don't need your father's light sabre, or to be bitten by a radioactive spider.You don't need to be stalked by a creepy ancient vampire who is basically a pedophile if you're younger than a redwood.Screw you mainstream media for making it look like moral courage requires hair gel, thousands of sit ups and millions of dollars of fake ass CGI.Moral courage is the gritty, scary and mostly anonymous process of challenging friends, co-workers and family on issues like spanking, taxation, debt, circumcision and war.Moral courage is standing up to bullies when the audience is not cheering, but jeering. It is helping broken people out of abusive relationships, and promoting the inner peace of self knowledge in a shallow and empty pseudo-culture.Moral courage does not ask for - or receive - permission or the praise of the masses. If the masses praise you, it is because you are helping distract them from their own moral cowardice and conformity. Those who provoke discomfort create change - no one else.So forget your politics and vampires and magic wands and photon torpedoes. Forget passively waiting for the world to provoke and corner you into being virtuous. It never will.Stop watching fictional courage and go live some; it is harder and better than anything you will ever see on a screen.Let's make the world change the classification of courage from 'fantasy' to 'documentary.'You know there are people in your life who are doing wrong. Go talk to them, and encourage them to pursue philosophy, self-knowledge and virtue.Be your own hero; you are the One that your world has been waiting for.
Stefan Molyneux
My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.
Voltaire