Quotes by Philosophers - Page 145

And whenever you look at somebody as an enemy,you never look deep,you never look into the eye, you avoid. Don't be a fighter, be a lover.
Osho
We always live in the tommorow,which never comes and which cannot come; it is impossible. That which comes always is today, and we go on sacrificing today for tommorow,which is nowhere. The mind goes on thinking of the past,which you have destroyed,which you have sacrificed for something that has not come. And then it goes on postponing for further tommorows.
Osho
Transformation happens only when you put your total energy into it.
Osho
I never use the word renunciation at all. I say: "Rejoice in life,in love,in meditation,in the beauties of the world, in the ecstasy of existence--rejoice in everything!" Transform the mundane into the sacred. Transform this shore ino the other shore, transform the earth into paradise.And then indirectly a certain renunciation starts happening. But that happens,you don't do it. It is not a doing, it is a happening.
Osho
As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won’t have to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries – the chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.... If you could pass through it without losing your consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, ”whatever misery I have created, I’ll go through it, I’ll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered any misery – I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain, or sorrow.
Osho
Start with very small experiments. When anger arises, stop! What is the hurry? When you feel hatred, wait! There should be some interval. Reply only when you are fully conscious – not until that. You will find that all that is sinful in life has fallen away from you; all that is wrong is banished forever. You will suddenly discover, there is no need to respond to anger. Perhaps you might feel like thanking the man who insults you. Because he has obliged you. He gave you an opportunity to awaken.Kabir has said stay near the one who is critical of you. Look after him and serve him who is abusing you because it is he who gives you the opportunity to awaken.All the occasions that drown you in unconsciousness can be turned into stepping stones to awareness if you wish so. Life is like a huge boulder lying in the middle of the road. Those who are foolish, see the stone as a barrier and turn back. For them the road is closed. Those who are clever, climb the stone and use it as a step. And the moment they make it a stepping stone greater heights are available to them.A seeker should keep in mind only one factor, and that is: to utilize each moment to awaken awareness. Then be it hunger or anger or lust or greed, every state can be utilized towards awareness.
Osho
Whenever you’ll open your eyes, you will find nothing but ugliness and misery all around you. Everything looks fine when you are in an unconscious state. This is the reason why you find it difficult to conceive: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. You say, ”Impossible!” That’s why one needs to go through pain. That is called tapascharya, spiritual practice. Whenever one begins to become aware, first he will have to go through suffering. For lives you have created misery around you, who else would pass through it if not you? That is what we have called the karma.
Osho
You listen to anybody who suppresses you. And your personality fractures into thousands of pieces. Until you begin to listen to the inner voice, you cannot be an integrated whole.I call him a sannyasin who has begun to heed the inner voice and is ready to stake everything on it. But you cannot hear the inner voice as long as you are unconscious. Until then whatever you might take to be the inner voice will not be the inner voice; it will be a voice from outsideThe voice that satisfies you is the voice of your desires, but you call it your inner voice.Only the awakened person has an inner voice. Once this voice comes within range of your hearing, all that is sinful, all that is impure and dirty, all the chaos and confusion within you, will cease at once. You will then realize what a collection of personalities you have been.
Osho
So start with the waking state. When you are hungry eat, but always remember that it is the body that is hungry, not you. If you hurt your leg, wash and clean the wound, apply medication, but always remember that it is the body that is hurt, not you. This much remembrance – and you will find that ninety-nine percent of the pain has vanished. This slight knowledge, this little awareness removes so much of your suffering. One percent is bound to remain because the knowledge is not total. When knowledge becomes total all of the suffering disappears.Buddha said that an awakened person is beyond suffering. You can cut off the limbs of such a person, you can throw him in the fire, you can kill him, but you cannot make him suffer, because he stands apart from all that is happening around him.
Osho
Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding, to be more aware? To be more alert, to be more alive?
Osho
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
Clothes are a homeless man’s home.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To a homeless man, home is literally where the heart is.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.
Simone Weil
The ancients said that for persons who cultivated body and mind, and who are virtuous and honorable, death is an experience of liberation, a long-awaited rest from a lifetime of labors. Death helps the unscrupulous person to put an end to the misery of desire. Death, then, for everyone is a kind of homecoming. That is why the ancient sages speak of a dying person as a person who is 'going home.
Liezi
From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
Albert Camus
It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.
G.K. Chesterton
It is not the truth which has to be sought, it is you who have to be brought home.
Osho
Home is where you feel more welcome, more secure, have more rights, where you are loved. This place can be any place even away from what you would normally call home.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
Gaston Bachelard
Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
Henry David Thoreau
The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.
Plato
PoetTo mask the fiery thought,in simple words succeeds.For still the craft of genius is,To mask a king in weeds
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.
Cornel West
The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proporttion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents.
Thomas Nagel
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much
Blaise Pascal
We’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us.
Cornel West
It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life?Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?
Alain de Botton
My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.
Derek Parfit
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.
Nicolas Chamfort
Be your own master, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal creature.
Marcus Aurelius
If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.
Richard Kearney
Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
An opportunity fordoing an injury happens a hundred times a day, hut for doing good not once a year," says Zoroaster.
Voltaire
Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled. The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of die acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. 'Non-attached* is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves.Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these. For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavel's phrase, 'they are not enough, Non-attachment to self and to what are called 'the things of this world' has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.
Aldous Huxley
Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!
Bertrand Russell
It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.
Alain de Botton
I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.
Ayn Rand
Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.
Karl Jaspers
Socrates insisted that there's a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health. Different beliefs lead to different emotional states...
Jules Evans
The end toward which all human acts are directed is happiness.
Aristotle
The saddest of all tragedies - the wasted life
Aristotle
So long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist
Epicurus
Nature loves to hide.
Heraclitus
You cannot step into the same river twice
Heraclitus of Ephesus
The Master, by residing in the Tao,sets an example for all beings.Because he doesn't display himself,people can see his light.Because he has nothing to prove,people can trust his
Lao Tzu
I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.
Albert Camus
Hatred is as much an attachment as desire. Love liberates.
Chaitanya
Most of us are “living the dream” living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.
William B. Irvine
Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.
Seneca
...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...
William B. Irvine
Adharmenaidhate tabat, tato bhadrani pashyati, tatah sapatnan jayati, - samulastu vinashyati. In unrightousness they prosper, in it they find their good, through it they defeat their enemies, - but they perish at the root.
Rabindranath Tagore
The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” ― Plato, Plato's Republic
Plato
Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers.
Socrates
I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundreth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.
Seneca
Sexual ecstasy is like death. It is one of the secrets of nature’s wisdom.
Marcus Aurelius
What sort of charge against old age is the nearness of death, when this is shared by youth?Yes, you will say; but a young man expects to live long; an old man cannot expect to do so.Well, the young man is a fool to expect it. For what can be more foolish than to regard the uncertain as certain, the false as true? An old man has nothing even to hope. ' Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than the young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained:The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long.And yet! what is 'long' in a man's life? For grant the utmost limit: let us expect an age like that of the king of the Tartessi, who reigned eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty.Nothing seems long in which there is any . last' , for when that arrives, then all the past has slipped away -only that remains which you have earned by virtue and righteous actions.Hours indeed, and days and months and years depart, nor does past time ever return, nor can the future be known.Whatever time each is granted for life, with that he is bound to be content.
A.C. Grayling