Quotes by Philosophers - Page 118

If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.
A.C. Grayling
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
Albert Camus
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man without regrets cannot be cured.
Aristotle
It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea.
Seneca
Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it?
Pascal Mercier
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Rather be alone, than being with someone who is aloof.
Gift Gugu Mona
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
Albert Camus
Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
And he began, "What chance or destinyhas brought you here before your final day?And who is he who leads your pilgrimage?""Up there in life beneath the quiet starsI lost my way," I answered, "in a valley,before I'd reached the fullness of my age.I turned my shoulders on it yesterday:this soul appeared as I was falling back,and by the road through Hell he leads me home.""Follow your star and you will never fail to find your glorious port," he said to me
Dante Alighieri
The teachers of hell should be sent there first to be able to describe it accurately
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If god created hell, who will blame his followers for trying to establish it on earth
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The best way to turn the earth into hell is to turn the state into a god.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Surrender as you enter, every hope you have.
Dante Alighieri
For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A hell, from which one can be saved by a quibble that would carry no weight with a police magistrate, cannot be taken very seriously.
Aldous Huxley
Hell is nothing but a place we wish God has created for our enemies, we ourselves think that he will ultimately show some kind of clemency towards us
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A god without wrath, without intimidation, without punishment, without hell? It would be a paper tiger, a teddy bear!
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Hell was invented to scare to death the unruly human mind and bring it to obedience.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It's a harrowing experience to see death approaching in haste towards you, what is hell but confronting your own mortality
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Karma and Hell are the cowards revenge
Christopher Zzenn Loren
Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God's truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness.
Peter Kreeft
Through me is the way to the city of woe. Through me is the way to sorrow eternal. Through me is the way to the lost below. Justice moved my architect supernal. I was constructed by divine power,supreme wisdom, and love primordial. Before me no created things were. Save those eternal, and eternal I abide. Abandon all hope, you who enter.
Dante Alighieri
The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force... Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
Hypatia
You did thirst for blood, and with blood I fill you
Dante Alighieri
Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.
Gregory B. Sadler
The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy
Gregory B. Sadler
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.
Peter Kreeft
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?
Augustine of Hippo
All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language.
James K.A. Smith
If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.
James K.A. Smith
His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses: present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation.
Augustine of Hippo
... the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord.
Augustine of Hippo
If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?
Daniel C. Dennett
Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other. With the greater consciousness of the issues involved comes a lesser assurance that an alternative is possible.
Gordon H. Clark
Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Søren Kierkegaard
The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
Thomas Paine
An educated theologian: someone who's better at rationalizing what they're pretending to know.
Peter Boghossian
The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.
Thomas Aquinas
Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.
John Ruskin
Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that “theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation’s characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal—that is, deductive—logic.
Andrew Bernstein
In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)
Alvin Plantinga
Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.
Andrew Bernstein
I have found that the more I reflect philosophically on the attributes of God the more overwhelmed I become at his greatness and the more excited I become about Bible doctrine. Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.
William Lane Craig
There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
G.K. Chesterton
You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge.
Augustine of Hippo
If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . -- The Secret of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.
Paul Tillich
The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat, which isn’t really there. And the definition of a theologian is he’s somebody who finds it.
Michael Ruse
That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:
Augustine of Hippo
Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds.
David Bentley Hart
As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
Rebecca Goldstein
Go back to Socrates: "Know thyself." For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you?
Peter Kreeft
To find the Father of all is hard. And when found, it is impossible to utter Him.
Socrates