Quotes by Philosophers - Page 103

This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness amounts to an existential — and “preventive” — refutation of the ideologies of doubt: if a man is able to doubt, it is because there is certainty; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality. It follows that there are necessarily some men who know reality and who therefore have certainty; and the great spokesmen of this knowledge and certainty are necessarily the best of men. For if truth were on the side of doubt, the individual who doubted would be superior not only to these spokesmen, who have not doubted, but also to the majority of normal men across the millennia of human existence. If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason, and man would be less than an animal, for the intelligence of animals does not doubt the reality to which it is proportioned.
Frithjof Schuon
[D]oubt, the principle of theoretic freedom, appears to me a crime. … [T]he highest crime is doubt in God, or the doubt that God exists. … [T]hat which I do not trust myself to doubt, … without feeling disturbed in my soul, without incurring guilt; that is no matter of theory, but a matter of conscience[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
...we ought also to consider as false all that is doubtful.
René Descartes
Doubt is the first ray of illumination
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Divine determination and decree is this: that God has foreordained all people without exception unto eternal life, for his love is unconditional.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.
Peter Sloterdijk
What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex network of structural mediation, it generates idiotic pleasure by focusing attention on itself. This unintended self-reflexivity is something of which Adorno undoubtedly was not aware: his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing. Is this not an exemplary case of his unconscious reflexivity of thinking? When criticizing his opponent Wagner, Adorno effectively deploys a critical allegory of his own writing - in Hegelese, the truth of his relation to the Other is a self-relation.
Slavoj Žižek
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
G.K. Chesterton
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
Mark Fisher
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
Albert Camus
Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!
Aldous Huxley
We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.
Michel Foucault
What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.
Umberto Eco
You are so lost to your higher self that you would resent me for my achievements, rather than celebrate them with me, sexually?
Ayn Rand
As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.
Søren Kierkegaard
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Albert Camus
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
Umberto Eco
She knew of a woman who had entered such a bargain at a large automobile manufacturer in 1973 and successfully managed to keep her accounting position for over four decades.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit.
Eugen Herrigel
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith
Power and love can break the most stubborn resistence
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Money makes the world go round, but love makes the universe go in every direction.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rose's prick is better than a daisy's kiss.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is sweet even when what you go through is bitter.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love's whispers drown out sorrow's echoes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who has love in his heart has the universe in his hands.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Quiet love is better than loud hate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When you fall for someone not even reason can help you up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you love a bird don't hold it too tightly or you'll soon be nursing a broken heart.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't believe a man will give you the world if he doesn't even buy you flowers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A bird cannot love freely when caged.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When someone steals your heart not even the law can help you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Birds build nests because they cannot fly forever.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don't need to move mountains when love will fly you over.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Falling in love is better than standing in hate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is blind, but a broken heart sees everything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be the spouse you wish to have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is the master key that opens every blessings door.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love has no spear but conquers hearts.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you fall in love, make sure your landing is soft.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is not the size of the ring, but the size of the love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You only need to steal a woman's heart if she won't give it to you willingly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is blind, and therefore not responsible for whoever she bumps into.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If your love for your wife can be measured, it is not big enough.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I have never met anyone who gave back a heart they stole.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Running away from someone you love is a race you will never win.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is never a crime to steal the heart of someone you love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Eternity is a long time, but only a day when you are in love.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Money can't buy love, but it can buy a woman's attention.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is the only tyrant whose reign is sweet.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If a man does not treat you like a princess during courtship, he will not treat you like a queen during marriage.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love makes the world go round, but sometimes you spin so much you end up dizzy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Strength conquers some, might conquers many, power conquers numerous, but love conquers all.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Consider your goal like a war to win and use whatever strategies you know to win
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.
Charles Eisenstein