Quotes by Philosophers - Page 11

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The fewer our wants the nearer we resemble the gods.
Socrates
When an idea is too weak to support a simple statement it is a sign that it should be rejected.
Vauvenargues
Simple truths are a relief from grand speculations.
Vauvenargues
Nothing is more simple than greatness indeed to be simple is to be great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism and spends his energies upon that.
Joseph Rickaby
The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed- it is a process of elimination.
Elbert Hubbard
Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
Manifest plainness Embrace simplicity Reduce selfishness Have few desires.
Lao Tzu
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.
Alan Watts
First say to yourself what you would be and then do what you have to do.
Epictetus
The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
Aldous Huxley
What you do not want done to yourself do not do to others.
Confucius
There is only one meaning of life the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm
If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Alan Watts
A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped for everything cannot be equally considered in a word he must be able to simplify his duties his business and his life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de La Bruyère
I regret often that I have spoken never that I have been silent.
Syrus
To be simple is the best thing in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
To be simple is to be great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature has given to men one tongue but two ears that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
Epictetus
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent.
Jean de La Bruyère
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
G.K. Chesterton
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
Silence is deep as Eternity speech shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley
We need a reason to speak but none to keep silent.
Pierre Nicole
Shame is an ornament to the young a disgrace to the old.
Aristotle
What shadows we are what shadows we pursue!
Edmund Burke
Shadows are in reality when the sun is shining the most conspicuous thing in a landscape next to the highest lights.
John Ruskin
I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was possible for me to execute myself.
Charles Montesquieu
God has entrusted me with myself.
Epictetus
It is vain to ask of the gods what man is capable of supplying for himself.
Epicurus
Religious faith indeed relates to that which is above us but it must arise from that which is within us.
Josiah Royce
The Ancient Mariner said to Neptune during a great storm "O God you will save me if you wish but I am going to go on holding my tiller straight."
Michel de Montaigne
Fair play with others is primarily not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us.
Eric Hoffer
Mistakes fail in their mission of helping the person who blames them on the other fellow.
Henry S. Haskins
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment and learn again to exercise ... his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Albert Schweitzer
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
Aristotle
Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are by their very nature highly uncertain precarious ephemeral and subject to chance.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily.
Plato
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks but only at what he does himself to make it just and holy.
Marcus Aurelius
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus
To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy or to pursue any excessive desire diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.
Eric Hoffer
When I have been unhappy I have heard an opera ... and it seemed the shrieking of winds when I am happy a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy but I that make it sweet.
John Ruskin
Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things alter for the worse spontaneously if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Francis Bacon
Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
Josiah Royce
Be yourself and think for yourself and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
Elbert Hubbard
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
Look well into thyself there is a source which will always spring up if thou wilt always search there.
Marcus Aurelius
Man must be arched and buttressed from within else the temple wavers to dust.
Marcus Aurelius
Every man is his own ancestor and every man his own heir. He devises his own future and he inherits his own past.
H. F. Hedge
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
Simone de Beauvoir
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Robert M. Pirsig