Quotes by Philosophers - Page 101

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn
Bertrand Russell
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.
Elbert Hubbard
leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The
Rebecca Goldstein
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,
Rebecca Goldstein
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.
Rebecca Goldstein
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Rebecca Goldstein
But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best.
Plato
of their passions in the same object at that particular time.
Adam Smith
at Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts.
Niccolò Machiavelli
one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.
Rebecca Goldstein
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
this is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others,
Plato
virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.
Plato
a life without investigation is not worth living
Plato
Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity.
Augustine of Hippo
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Marquis de Sade
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
Susan Sontag
This disease of curiosity.
Augustine of Hippo
Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.
Michel Foucault
A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
Alain de Botton
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The nature of the mind is to acquire, to absorb, is it not? Or rather the pattern it has created for itself is one of gathering in, and in that very activity the mind is preparing its own weariness, boredom. Interst, curiosity, is the beginning of acquisition, wich soon becomes boredom; and the urge to be free from boredom is another form of possession. So the mind goes from boredom to interest to boredom again, til it is utterly weary; and these successive waves of interest and weariness are regarded as existence."Commentaries on Living, Series II
Jiddhu Krishnamurti
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
René Descartes
It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.
Jostein Gaarder
He who least needs tomorrow, will most gladly greet tomorrow.
Epicurus
Any day stands equal to the rest.
Heraclitus
To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.
Denis de Rougemont
What possible good does it do to resent any moment for unfolding as it does, to wish it didn't happen? Does it change the moment in any positive way? No it does not.
Guy Finley
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan W. Watts
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
Susan Sontag
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the “mystified” form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other’s gifts — recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year’s present once again … ) …the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person’s gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the “pre-economy of the economy,” its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.
Slavoj Žižek
Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone de Beauvoir
Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct
Simone de Beauvoir
Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Never do an enemy a small injury.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The only way to gall and fret effectively is for yourself to be a good and honest man.
Diogenes of Sinope
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emil M. Cioran
People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
Marcus Aurelius
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
Henry David Thoreau
They view New York as Satan's waiting room." "If this is the waiting room, where does the guy reside or work?" "New Jersey, I assume," Kyle said with a smile. "I mean, dude, have you been to Jersey?
Michael Murphy
Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.
Albert Camus
When I was young, I believed God was a woman because I couldn't come up with any other explanation as to why the universe was so tidy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A man who boasts he's the head of the home must never forget the woman is the knife at his throat.
Matshona Dhliwayo
She complains that I'm lazy, but I just like to save my energy for dinner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Women are heavyweight boxers; only, they punch with words, not fists.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A mother’s eyes are like God; impossible to get away from, they see everything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ask your wife for forgiveness, even when you’re right.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The easiest way to be the prettiest girl at a party is to rig the guest list.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man."Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth."Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!""Every man is dangerous," said the old man, without moving, "Who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.
G.K. Chesterton
Things joined by profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each other aside.
Zhuangzi
The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain de Botton
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
Do not keep the slanderer away,treat him with affection and honor:Body and soul, he scours all clean,babbling about this and that.
Kabir
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin