Quotes by Philosophers - Page 104

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.
Charles Eisenstein
Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.
Charles Eisenstein
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
Charles Eisenstein
We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
Charles Eisenstein
When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.
Charles Eisenstein
The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.
Charles Eisenstein
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.
Charles Eisenstein
It is the cry of the separate self, ‘What about me?’ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.
Charles Eisenstein
It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.Fear it or not, it is happening already.
Charles Eisenstein
I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.
Charles Eisenstein
Writing a book is burning your brain to enlighten another man's mind
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
Simone de Beauvoir
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
Aristotle
everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking...
Baruch Spinoza
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil M. Cioran
Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Ambition is greed without makeup.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.
Neel Burton
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.
Ayn Rand
A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
Marcus Aurelius
Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.
Epicurus
If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?
Iris Murdoch
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am smart because I know I nothing.
Plato
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
Bertrand Russell
Happy is the man who is nothing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.
Henry David Thoreau
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
Robert M. Pirsig
The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:The moon is within me, and so is the sun.The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:When that comes, then work is put away.The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.
Kabir
For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.
Vilém Flusser
Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When you realize there is nothing lacking,the whole world belongs to you.
Lao Tzu
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
I know that I know nothing
Plato
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
Albert Camus
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Only by knowing yourself can you live honestly and find your own path.
Gregory Bassham
we live our lives from the "inside", from the vantage point of our own personal mini-cam on life. This gives us privileged access to what's going on inside our own heads. But sometimes we can be too close to ourselves to see us as we truly are. We lack perspective, objectivity. That's where friends can help. Friends can tell you when you're selfish or rude or making a total fool of yourself. Conversely, they can let you know when you're being kind or generous or need to lighten up on yourself.
Gregory Bassham
It's in out-of-the-ordinary situations - especially situations of challenge or adversity - that the most important differences between people shine through.
Gregory Bassham
we live best when we live for a cause greater than ourselves
Michael W. Austin
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it
Albert Camus
Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
G.K. Chesterton
I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?”t“Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.
Plato
If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them-just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.
Ayn Rand
… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)
Richard McSweeney
One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.
Georg Simmel
He who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.
Confucius
By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.
Georg Simmel
Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.
Georg Simmel
Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him?
Zhuangzi
Everything you know gained from experience
Jostein Gaarder
Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Søren Kierkegaard
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.
Aristotle