Quotes by Philosophers - Page 105

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously
Confucius
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
Bertrand Russell
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.
Voltaire
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
Life enslaves the poor by giving them problems that money can resolve, or, dissolve
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life humbles the rich by giving them problems that money can’t resolve, or, dissolve. Life enslaves the poor by giving them problems that money can resolve, or, dissolve.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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
And what physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.
Niccolò Machiavelli
What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
Susan Sontag
The difficult problems in life always start off being simple. Great affairs always start off being small.
Lao Tzu
Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
Dogen Zenji
The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Élisabeth Badinter
The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning professional, does not smoke, takes prenatal classes, and benefits from a long maternity leave.
Élisabeth Badinter
Mothers with high ideals for child-rearing must pay the price for those ideals.
Élisabeth Badinter
An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.
Élisabeth Badinter
How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
G.K. Chesterton
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
G.K. Chesterton
Dream all you can, live all you say, work all you must.
Matshona Dhliwayo
They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.
Henry David Thoreau
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
Aldous Huxley
A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.
Criss Jami
I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn't try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I've always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I've never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood.
Jostein Gaarder
I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.
Marshall McLuhan
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.
Voltaire
It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.
Voltaire
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G.K. Chesterton
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God grante
Voltaire
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t stop searching for opportunities until opportunities find you.
Gift Gugu Mona
But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more. Neither will anyone who has failed to keep a story to himself keep the name of his informant to himself. Every person without exception has someone to whom he confides everything that is confided to himself. Even supposing he puts some guard in his garrulous tongue and is content with a single pair of ears, he will still be the creator of a host of later listeners – such is the way in which what was but a little while before a secret becomes common rumor.
Seneca
As long as they don't know, I am safe
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Eugen Herrigel
You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.
Eugen Herrigel
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Eugen Herrigel
To enter the Buddha Way is to stop discriminating between good and evil and to cast aside the mind that says this is good and that is bad.
Dōgen
Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves.
Dōgen
Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Eugen Herrigel
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
Robert M. Pirsig
You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Qaulity or fall away from Qaulity together.
Robert M. Pirsig
To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.
Alan W. Watts
The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.
Alan W. Watts
What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
We will be entering the beautiful world of a Zen master's no-mind. Sosan is the third Zen Patriarch. Nothing much is known about him- this is as it should be, because history records only violence. History does not record silence- it cannot record it. All records are of disturbance. Whenever someone becomes really silent, he disappears from all records, he is no more a part of our madness. So it is as it should be.Ch. 1: The Great Way Is Not Difficult
Osho
[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.
Alan W. Watts
[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself. It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan W. Watts
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Alan W. Watts
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Alan W. Watts
Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.
Robert M. Pirsig
The title of this Chautauqua is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," not "Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing," and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop. The only Zen you fin on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Robert M. Pirsig
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Alan W. Watts
People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something-always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring.
Bodhidharma
The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like the root of a tree. All a tree’s fruit and flowers, branches and leaves depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort.
Bodhidharma
My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.
Alan W. Watts