Quotes by Philosophers - Page 107

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
Rabindranath Tagore
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Henry David Thoreau
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Unlike ‘mere’ medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.
Neel Burton
If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board.What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.
Neel Burton
Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience.
Neel Burton
Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.
Criss Jami
...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again."One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
G.K. Chesterton
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.
Publilius Syrus
... When Princes devote themselves rather to pleasure than to arms, they lose their dominions.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... War is the sole art looked for in one who rules...
Niccolò Machiavelli
The success of any country relies on the commitment of its leaders to serve others.
Gift Gugu Mona
Don't tell your friend you are fighting with your wife, he will use your weakness against you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
One good friend is better than a thousand questionable ones.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be the friend you wish to have.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Enmity dies when friendship is born.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Bruises from a friend are better than kisses from an enemy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your greatest friendships are those that survive the greatest storms.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Building bridges requires greater effort than building walls.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Debate, but do not argue.Challenge, but do not force your opinions.To win an argument, but lose a friendship, is a loss.To lose an argument, but retain a friendship, is gain.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A loyal pet is better than a faithless friend.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God is always the first one there when we fall,but most of us don’t look up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If we take care of our neighbors,our neighbors will take care of us.If we take care of our friends,our friends will take care of us.If we take care of our family,our family will take care of us.If we take care of others,our God will take care of us.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Teachers are in your life to guide you.Friends are in your life to support you.Parents are in your life to bless you.Enemies are in your life to strengthen you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those who put you in difficult times are enemies.Those who forsook you in difficult times are acquaintances.Those who stood by you in difficult times are friends.Those who fought for you in difficult times are family.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Those who know you see your tears even in the rain.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night...
William H. Gass
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert Camus
Love is the politics of sex
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some people use love as a tool to enslave others
Bangambiki Habyarimana
(To the haters) You are not extinguishing the bright lights of mankind, you're simply burying yourself in an unmarked grave.
Stefan Molyneux
It is really exhausting to live in a dictatorship of 'Me', which is basically a tyranny of others.
Stefan Molyneux
Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other.
T.F. Hodge
It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.
A.C. Grayling
I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.
Criss Jami
...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.
G.K. Chesterton
Every past is worth condemning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything flows and nothing stays.
Heraclitus
But if it be true, as every prospect assures us, that the human race shall not again relapse into its ancient barbarity; if every thing ought to assure us against that pusillanimous and corrupt system which condemns man to eternal oscillations between truth and falsehood, liberty and servitude, we must, at the same time, perceive that the light of information is spread over a small part only of our globe; and the number of those who possess real instruction, seems to vanish in the comparison with the mass of men consigned over to ignorance and prejudice. We behold vast countries groaning under slavery, and presenting nations in one place, degraded by the vices of civilization, so corrupt as to impede the progress of man; and in others, still vegetating in the infancy of its early age. We perceive that the exertions of these last ages have done much for the progress of the human mind, but little for the perfection of the human species; much for the glory of man, somewhat for his liberty, but scarcely any thing yet for his happiness. In a few directions, our eyes are struck with a dazzling light; but thick darkness still covers an immense horison.
Nicolas de Condorcet
Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.
Elbert Hubbard
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
Walter Benjamin
Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?
Oswald Spengler
You Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
War is progress, peace is stagnation
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Your progress as a Jiu Jitsu practitioner is a direct reflection of the standards you have for yourself.
Chris Matakas
There is no such thing as progress or regress. The world is not getting better and better, nor is it getting worse and worse. It is simply moving along into the future, reiterating in different configurations the patterns that have already occurred. We can’t help but play a role in this unfolding drama, but it is a mistake to think that what we do makes any difference to the grand scheme of things.
John Marmysz
If America and the Western world continue in their state of unconscious hopelessness, lack of faith and of fortitude, it is predictable that they will not be able to resist the temptation of the big bang by nuclear weapons, which would end all problems - overpopulation, boredom, and hunger - since it would do away with all life.
Erich Fromm
Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.
Stanisław Lem
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil M. Cioran
The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
G.K. Chesterton
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
Norbert Wiener
The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
Auguste Comte
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Ernest Renan
It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.
Martin Cohen