Quotes by Philosophers - Page 117

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.
Ilchi Lee
So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
Elbert Hubbard
The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.
Alain de Botton
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.
Jean Rostand
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
Horace
Not smoking is not an achievement. Like virginity, it comes standard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.
Alain de Botton
To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!
Ayn Rand
This catch-22 happens a lot to men. A man can sense that a woman wants to know if he loves her. He doesn't want to share those feelings because, if he does, she will expect him to marry her and be greatly hurt if he doesn't. In romantic movies, loving someone meant that you wanted to marry her. In real life, it is not always the case.
John N Gray
Generally, a woman would rather be married to any man that she doesn’t hate, than remain unmarried to a man that she loves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A 'good man' is a male creature that survives the endless episodes that its woman spends complaining about women who she hates, and, women who hate her.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Courtship is an activity whereby one losses oneself … whilst trying to win someone’s love.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If love wasn’t conditional, every single first encounter with individuals of your 'preferred' gender would result in *love at first sight.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Courting is an activity where a man and a woman flaunt their virtues. Dating is an activity where life exposes the other’s vices.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Marriage and dating are man-made ideologies; if having a lover was a prerequisite to living, we’d all be born in pairs; as couples.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Love songs are nothing without exaggeration.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Women who do not play hard to get are hard to get.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Money cannot buy you love. But it sure can buy you things that some people will love you for having.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Once a woman goes over 25, she prioritizes 'financial security' in a potential lover. Love and good looks are just a bonus.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A wedding is a ceremony men fund with money they know they don’t have … to prove the love they think they have.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people can’t stand spending a few minutes by themself. Yet they expect others to spend an hour, a day, or, even a lifetime, with them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you’ve reached the end of a relationship: when your lover now demands that your jokes be funny before they laugh.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Not every happy person is married, and, Not every married person is happy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some wo/men are so possessive … you end up missing missing them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The phrase *You complete me* is nonsensical. A couple is a *we* … not a complete *me.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Those who say that money can’t buy you love make it sound as if love can buy you money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Marriage is the commodification of affection, copulation, and, reproduction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A broke man’s lover doesn’t feel ‘loved’ on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine’s Day.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover’s world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian’s world revolves around the world.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Mr. Right' is usually two or eight men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Be ashamed not of being single, or, unemployed. That comes standard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A love triangle is a threesome delayed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A tomboy is a bisexual girl’s dream lover.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Any relationship (friend, romantic or business) that's one sided isn't one; it's a one way street headed in one direction... nowhere. Cultivation requires input from willing participants.
T.F. Hodge
I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.
Voltaire
The weapons of divine justice are blunted by the confession and sorrow of the offender.
Dante Alighieri
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.
Miguel de Unamuno
To laugh often and much,to win the respect of the intelligent peopleand the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest criticsand endure the betrayal of false friends;to appreciate beauty;to find the best in others; to leave the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.
Rabindranath Tagore
Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.
T.E. Hulme
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Aldous Huxley
Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?""If you take care of it.""What do you have to do?""Lot's of things. You've been watching me.""Will you show me all of them?""Sure.""Is it hard?""Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.""Oh."After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, "Dad?""What?""Will I have the right attitudes?""I think so," I say. "I don't think that will be any problem at all.
Robert M. Pirsig
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
Baruch Spinoza
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
To solve a problem, you need to remove the cause, not the symptom.
Liezi
Forsake not the friendship of those who have been your staff in adversity, Forget not be benevolence of the blameless.
Thiruvalluvar
Integrity, wisdom, skill, intelligence – such things are forged in adversity.
Mencius
by indignities men come to dignities
Francis Bacon
The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.
Hannah Arendt
You are unfortunate in my judgment, for you have never been unfortunate. You have passed through life with no antagonist to face you; no one will know what you were capable of, not even you yourself.
Seneca
These are the times that try men's souls.
Thomas Paine
He who is a firstling is ever sacrificed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
Thomas Aquinas
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.
Jean-Paul Sartre