Quotes by Philosophers - Page 12

The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One of the main functions of a push-up bra is to lower the number of mothers who seem like mothers.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The kind of lies that someone tells us gives us an idea of how stupid, knowledgeable, intelligent, or ignorant they are … or they think we are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Being bored is the price we pay for not being insane.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are loved way more by some of the people who have not contacted us in the last twelve or so months than we are loved by some of those who contact us every twelve or so days … or hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people will hate you for not loving them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are way less likely to love someone just because they love us than we are to hate someone just because they hate us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The fact that the person who you are sleeping with is also sleeping with another person or other people does not necessarily mean that he or she does not love you. And the fact that you are the only person who someone is sleeping with does not necessarily mean that he or she loves you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A seemingly simple task like taking a bath or wearing a condom feels like multitasking to someone who suffers from hemiplegia or has only one hand.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A relationship is likely to last way longer, if each partner convinces or has convinced themselves that they do not deserve their partner, even if that is not true.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To ask a man whether or not he has a girlfriend is to talk about his sex life. If you disagree with that, then how in the name of God do you differentiate between a man’s girlfriend and a girl that is a friend to the man?
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Patriotism is the narcissism of countries.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Having beef with someone is unnecessary and avoidable. Whatever the issue, if not positive, it is an opportunity to cut the excess fat from an unhealthy dietary network. Simply excuse yourself from the table of negativity and lean forward in peace.
T.F. Hodge
When spontaneous demoralizing thoughts seep into your conscience, don't trip...allowing them to fester. These are random tests of your conviction and determination. Large or small, your reaction to such intrusions is a defining moment for which no one else, but you, can mitigate.
T.F. Hodge
Search for the stranger inside you, forgotten even by your death.
Sorin Cerin
Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.
Criss Jami
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Richard M. Rorty
Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.
Criss Jami
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like.
Bart Schultz
If the entire world sought to make itself worthy of happiness rather than make itself happy, then the entire world would be happy.
Criss Jami
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Karl Marx
A day in a storm strengthens you more than a thousand in sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The poor can dream. The weak can hope. The helpless can strive. The powerless can rise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To encourage people, walk beside them. To inspire people, walk in front of them. To drive people, walk behind them. To lead people, walk with them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The struggles of the past are the gateway to the blessings of the future.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The storm is the optimist’s friend, but the pessimist’s nightmare.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be the calm in someone else’s storm.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The darkest storms color the brightest rainbows.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Learn from the ocean; not fearing turbulence, it uses the wind against it to rise instead.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.
Slavoj Žižek
Use your mind’s talents diligently, your heart’s powers incredibly, and your soul’s genius profitably.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you want to know how fortunate you are, visit three places: the slum, the hospital, and the cemetery.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Rain is just God weeping for Earth’s troubles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is impossible for a star to shine and not get noticed, even in the dark.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is not the size of a seed, but the size of what rises from it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The richest person in the cemetery is the one who left behind the most happy memories.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don’t have to swim when you know how to walk on water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The uglier the storm the lovelier the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You were given the problems you have because you can solve them; the burdens, because you can carry them; the trials, because you can overcome them; the opponents, because you can beat them; and the enemies, because you can conquer them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If the wind brushes against you, do not complain; it brushes against everyone.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You were not born to impress the world, but to impress the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Stars give so much to the world without demanding payment. Be likewise.
Matshona Dhliwayo