Quotes by Philosophers - Page 143

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.… The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.
Hannah Arendt
A problem well-defined is a problem half solved.
John Dewey
Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists somehow thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street; and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is difficult to either ignore or discount.
Neel Burton
To speak little is natural. Therefore a gale does not blow a whole morning nor does a downpour last a whole day.
Lao Tzu
Love is a power which produces love.
Erich Fromm
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
Marquis de Sade
The first revolution is to transform the status of evaluation from untouchable to respectable , i.e., from the days a century ago when the value-free doctrine held that there could be no place for the serious treatment of evaluation within the sciences (or in the company of other respectable disciplines like history, jurisprudence, mathematics, etc.) to the days when even the National Academy of Sciences is doing evaluations at the request of Congress without protest from leading scientific and other professional organizations, and everyone will have good reasons for this acceptance.
Michael Scriven
A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
Henry David Thoreau
No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people – then the Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.
Thomas Munro
Fame means being respected by everybody, or having some quality that is desired by all men, or by most, or by the good, or by the wise.
Aristotle
Our humanity consists in our ability to sense and respect and respond to the humanity of others.
C. Terry Warner
It is only in virtue that you can discover, that you can live - not in the cultivation of a virtue, which merely brings about respectability, not understanding and freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
A prince need take little account of conspiracies if the people are disposed in his favor.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...
Marquis de Sade
Respect yourself is you would have others respect you.
Baltasar Gracián
Don't despise people because of their defects or because of their lack of talents and gifts. Imagine if people did it for you, how many friends would you be left with?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
No one can insult me, because I do not want respect.No one can defeat me, because I have given up the idea of winning.How can you defeat me? You can only defeat someone who wants to win.
Lao Tzu
The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I would have you come into the heart of the outer world and meet reality. Merely going on with your household duties, living your life in the world of household conventions and the drudgery of household tasks - you were not made for that! If we meet, and recognize each other, in the real world, then only will our love be true.
Rabindranath Tagore
The eye of true equality often seems to have some degree of disrespect for the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty to the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty, although in reality, it's simply irrespectiveness.
Criss Jami
The immoral can no more earn respectThan the envious be rich.
Thiruvalluvar
When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.
Jean Vanier
For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.
Slavoj Žižek
Respect yourself and others will respect you.
Confucius
Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of -- for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
Socrates
When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.
Criss Jami
What to wear: An employee chooses. How to dress: His employer chose.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is highly probable that we choose our posture, not our problems.
T.F. Hodge
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.
Edmund Burke
There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, the way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody's conscious choice.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Chese now," quod she, "oon of thise thynges tweye:To han me foul and old til that I deye,And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,And nevere yow displese in al my lyf,Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,And take youre aventure of the repairThat shal be to youre hous by cause of me,Or in som oother place, may wel be.Now chese yourselven, wheither that yow liketh.
Geoffrey Chaucer
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
Ayn Rand
In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.
G.K. Chesterton
Perhaps in the pursuit of happiness, men and women take somewhat different paths. And, isn't it more than a little patronizing to suggest that most....women are not free? They're not self-determining human beings?
Christina Hoff Sommers
I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.
Heinz von Foerster
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
John Stuart Mill
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Simone Weil
To choose not to choose is still a choice for which you alone are responsible.
Gary Cox
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
Rabindranath Tagore
In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
Albert Camus
While one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The school should help its young people to discover their vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be the soil in which they can grow without fear, happily and integrally.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
When you've made up your mind, no use lagging behind, go ahead and no relenting,Let your youth have free reign, it won't come again, so be bold and no repenting.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Oh how can we, scarce mastering our passions, expect that youth should keep itself in check?
Friedrich Schiller
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David Thoreau
I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of heresy.
Augustine of Hippo
In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are the norm in interactions with people. The approval and disapproval of others become important, and the honest and sincere expression of thoughts and feelings is lost.
Liezi
Youth is a blind incongruous beast. It craves food but does not eat, is too timid to eat; it need simply nod to happiness, which strolls by on the street and would willingly stop, but it does not nod; it turns the faucet, permitting time to drain away uselessly and be lost, as though time were water. A beast that does not know it is a beast - such is youth. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
To refuse ever to deny your youth, right up to extreme old age, to battle all life long to transubstantiate your adolescent flowering into a fruit-ladden tree - that, I belive, is the road of the fulfilled man. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober.
Michel de Montaigne
The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
Aldous Huxley
Tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emil M. Cioran
No man knows he is young while he is young.
G.K. Chesterton
But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
John Cage
When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing.
Aristotle
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Arthur Schopenhauer