Quotes by Philosophers - Page 109

It is not enought to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.
Bruce Lee
People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel Foucault
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.
Judith Butler
The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.
Alan W. Watts
Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and excessive, with the excess as the form of appearance of the lack. On the one hand, sexuality is characterized by the universal capacity to provide the metaphorical meaning or innuendo of any activity or object–any element, including the most abstract reflection can be experienced as ‘alluding to that‘ (suffice it to recall the proverbial example of the adolescent who, in order to forget his sexual obsessions, takes refuge in pure mathematics and physics–whatever he does here again reminds him of ‘that’: how much volume is needed to fill out an empty cylinder? How much energy is discharged when two bodies collide?…). The universal surplus–this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience…is not the sign of preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.
Slavoj Žižek
Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.
Alain de Botton
As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.
Simone de Beauvoir
The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Michel Foucault
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?
Michel Foucault
There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes.
Edward Stein
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.
Michel Foucault
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.
Alain de Botton
I want to be the victim of his errors.
Marquis de Sade
To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth...
Nikos Kazantzakis
Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.
Plato
A man who lives long enough will be a boy twice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You can only be twice someone’s age once.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
Yehuda HaLevi
Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer be either dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
Marcus Aurelius
This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.
Michel de Montaigne
I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Henry David Thoreau
…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them
Robert Musil
Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.(No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
In all your course, walk with God and follow Christ as a little, poor, helpless child, taking hold of Christ’s hand, keeping your eye on the mark of the wounds on his hands and side, whence came the blood that cleanses you from sin and hiding your nakedness under the skirt of the white shining robe of his righteousness.
Jonathan Edwards
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
Iris Murdoch
A murderer is a killer without a uniform.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.
Thomas Paine
No matter how many men you kill, you can't kill your successor.
Seneca
In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
Albert Camus
They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.
William H. Gass
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.
Albert Camus
The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivablybe right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.
G.K. Chesterton
But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
Albert Camus
It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task oftmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.
Jacques Rancière
With homework, school prepares students for overtime. With reports, it prepares them for payday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils
Jostein Gaarder
I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?
Neel Burton
Dewey believed that education has a practical function and should not be seen as a series of pointless hurdles to jump over before 'real life' begins. Education isn't a preamble to life; it's part of life, and it exists to solve practical human problems and meet human needs.
Gregory Bassham
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Michel Foucault
Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.
Ivan Illich
Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.
Ivan Illich
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Equality has no place for genius.
Allen Bloom
A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice.
Thomas Paine
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.
Plato
Austen knew nothing of our modern quest for equality. People are not numbers, and so they are never “equal.” Some folk are higher placed than others, have more money, were more fortunate in their parents, or are brighter. These gifts do not come to us by merit but by the unfathomable providence of God.
John Mark Reynolds