Quotes by Philosophers - Page 148

We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack
Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer Et Al
Gratitude will make you feel great, choose to be grateful.
Gift Gugu Mona
Love is prayerfulness groping toward godliness. Love is poetry born out of the sheer joy of being. Love is song, dance, celebration: a song of gratitude, a dance of thankfulness, celebration for no reason at all, for this tremendous gift that goes on showering on us, for this whole universe, from the dust to the divine.
Osho
gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid but which none have a right to expect
Rousseau Jean-Jacques 1712-1778
When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
Alain de Botton
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
G.K. Chesterton
For each new morning with its light,For rest and shelter of the night,For health and food, for love and friends,For everything Thy goodness sends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take full account of what Excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.
Marcus Aurelius
Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Voltaire
Lao Tzu "The key to growth is the introductionof higher dimensions of consciousnessinto our awareness.
Lao Tzu
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Generosity is inverted prosperity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn."Benjamin Franklin never said those words, he was falsely attributed on a respected quotation website and it spread from there. The quote comes from the Xunzi.Xun Kuang was a Chinese Confucian philosopher that lived from 312-230 BC. His works were collected into a set of 32 books called the Xunzi, by Liu Xiang in about 818 AD. There are woodblock copies of these books that are almost 1100 years old.Book 8 is titled Ruxiao ("The Teachings of the Ru"). The quotation in question comes from Chapter 11 of that book. In Chinese the quote is:不闻不若闻之, 闻之不若见之, 见之不若知之, 知之不若行之It is derived from this paragraph:Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. (From the John Knoblock translation, which is viewable in Google Books)The first English translation of the Xunzi was done by H.H. Dubs, in 1928, one-hundred and thirty-eight years after Benjamin Franklin died.
Xun Kuang
It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya
Ibn Arabi
Some virtues, when they become fashions, also become exaggerated. Just because nobody likes a judgmental attitude does not mean that there isn't a sort of spoiled, self-righteous hypocrisy when one man obsessively commands other men not to judge without knowing the circumstances without himself, too, knowing their circumstances behind their judgments.
Criss Jami
The few individuals who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
Ortega y Gasset José
I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.
John Cage
My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.Truly yours,Albert Camus”I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
Albert Camus
When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences--their insignificant, everyday experiences--so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others--and how many there are!--are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No one could endure lasting adversity if it continued to have the same force as when it first hit us. We are all tied to Fortune, some by a loose and golden chain, and others by a tight one of baser metal: but what does it matter? We are all held in the same captivity, and those who have bound others are themselves in bonds - unless you think perhaps that the left-hand chain is lighter. One man is bound by high office, another by wealth; good birth weighs down some, and a humble origin others; some bow under the rule of other men and some under their own; some are restricted to one place by exile, others by priesthoods: all life is a servitude.So you have to get used to your circumstances, complain about them as little as possible, and grasp whatever advantage they have to offer: no condition is so bitter that a stable mind cannot find some consolation in it.
Seneca
Life has a positive and negative side. Happy people ignore the negative side
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The mind's health depends on what it feeds on. Avoid thoughts and conversations that kill your soul.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It does not matter what you have but who you are
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Endeavor to create heaven on earth and turn your heart into the new Jerusalem
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you don't like the solution, change the problem.
Criss Jami
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.
Robert M. Pirsig
An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realization of the object of action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed.
Immanuel Kant
Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .
Marcus Aurelius
It is not so much what happens to you as how you think about what happens." Epictetus
Epictetus
Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: 'Perhaps I need someone else to control me.
Criss Jami
We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.
G.K. Chesterton
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius
... no sensitive Christian can be satisfied with a distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness drawn only between communities, with each individual belonging unambiguously on one or the other side of the line. The behavior of "the righteous" is often very disappointing, while "the unrighteous" regularly perform in a manner that is much better than our theology might lead us to expect of them. Thus the need for a perspective that allows for both a rather slow process of sanctification in the Christian life and some sort of divine restraint on the power of sin in the unbelieving community. These theological adjustments to a religious perspective that might otherwise betray strong Manichean tones provide us with yet another reason for openness to a broad-ranging dialogue: Christians have good grounds for believing that their own weakness can be corrected by encountering the strengths of others.
Richard J. Mouw
The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.
G.K. Chesterton
Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
Michel de Montaigne
All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
G.K. Chesterton
What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God.
Augustine of Hippo
For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.
G.K. Chesterton
What kind of ministry is that, just talking to people?" Criticism directed at Francis Schaeffer's plan to open an obscure spot in the Swiss Alps to those who came with questions.
Nancy Pearcey
Don't kill the game with your 'funk', elevate it with your humility.
T.F. Hodge
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
G.K. Chesterton
There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility
Marcus Aurelius
The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.
John Stuart Mill
There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine’s critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another person only if you know something of humility; otherwise your ego gets in the way. If, however, you are humiliated instead of humbled, there is no ‘you’ to enter into a relationship. Massilians and Pelagians had differing understandings of when humility before God became too much of a good thing, but they had common cause in not liking Augustine’s scruples about the human will to relate to God. If everything about the soul’s relationship to God is God’s doing, including the very desire to be in relation, where exactly does the soul surface in its redemption? The Word seems to have become a monologue.
James Wetzel
The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.
Criss Jami
Humility raises us not by human arrogance but by divine grace.
Augustine of Hippo
You don't have to be a big name to do big things. Shine does not require recognition.
T.F. Hodge
No reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise.
Plato
Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.
Rebecca Goldstein
The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.
Plato
The pride which is proud of want of pride is the most intolerable of all.
Marcus Aurelius
I do not begin to think that I could possibly understand its inner-workings and the deepest truths of the cosmos with the 28 years that I have lived in Central New Jersey of the United States of America.
Chris Matakas
We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
If you're a boss, and not a leader, your time is limited.
T.F. Hodge
It often seems as though the silent, humble servant is secretly wiser and more discerning than the haughty master; yet through dutiful (and sometimes insecure) surrender he continues to serve and carry out petty orders in loyal acquiescence.
Criss Jami
Ego, being love's kryptonite; two souls must be on the same page of humility.
T.F. Hodge
A man is as old as his arteries and as young as his ideas.
Will Durant
We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.
Will Durant