Quotes by Philosophers - Page 151

One day, the old wise Socrates walks down the streets, when all of the sudden a man runs up to him "Socrates I have to tell you something about your friend who...""Hold up" Socrates interrupts him "About the story you're about to tell me, did you put it trough the three sieves?""Three sieves?" The man asks "What three sieves?""Let's try it" Socrates says."The first sieve is the one of truth, did you examine what you were about to tell me if it is true?" Socrates asks."Well no, I just overheard it" The man says."Ah, well then you have used the second sieve, the sieve of good?" Socrates asks "Is it something good what you're about to tell me?""Ehm no, on the contrary" the man answers."Hmmm" The wise man says "Let's use the third sieve then, is it necessary to tell me what you're so exited about?""No not necessary" the man says."Well" Socrates says with a smile "If the story you're about to tell me isn't true, good or necessary, just forget it and don't bother me with it.
Socrates
Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
Democritus
Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight
William James
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
G.K. Chesterton
...a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods.
Socrates
Every human being should regard himself as if he were exactly balanced between innocence and guilt. Simultaneously he should regard the world as being in the same case. It follows then that if he performs one good deed, he has weighted the scales in favour of both himself and of the whole world, and thus brought about salvation both for himself and for all the inhabitants of the world.
Maimonides
A Buddha is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad.
Bodhidharma
And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?John Galt
Ayn Rand
...the literary manifestation of the mind-body dichotomy that dominates today's culture: the split between the "serious" and the "entertaining" - the belief that if a literary work is "serious," it must bore people to death; and if it is "entertaining," it must not communicate anything of importance. (Which means that "the good" has to be painful, and that pleasure has to be mindlessly low-grade.)
Ayn Rand
The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.
G.K. Chesterton
Better things will follow you when you do good things to others.
Gift Gugu Mona
Although it's good to have talent, character is so much important because bad character is an enemy of great talent.
Gift Gugu Mona
Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.
Alain de Botton
Such things as are good simply because they have been commanded or instituted, or as being symbols of something good, are mere shadows which cannot be reckoned among actions that are the offspring, as it were, or fruit of a sound mind and of intellect.
Baruch Spinoza
The "whole good" cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. "'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled.
Josef Pieper
A good man? A man who successfully conceals his evil actions
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Sam Harris
The best is the enemy of good.
Voltaire
Dont switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards
Ayn Rand
Word Powers:A beautiful bitch has four legs, not two. Even terms of, so called, endearment have unintended manifestations. Guard your grill.
T.F. Hodge
Woman must be financially independent to be free in love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
...a woman not yet seen, but whose perfume accumulates on the horizon like a storm cloud.
Fernand Dumont
A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
G.K. Chesterton
If human beings were really progressive creatures, then all boys would be smarter, healthier, and, wealthier, than their grandfathers.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Luck is blind, they say. It can’t see where it’s going and keeps running into people…and the people it knocks into we call lucky! Well, to hell with luck if it's like that, I say!
Nikos Kazantzakis
This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures, and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life; since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable; and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.
Thomas More
Despise no new accident in your body, but ask opinion of it… There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man’s observation, what he finds good and of what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.
Francis Bacon
I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
Voltaire
It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.
Henry David Thoreau
In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which results from an undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures; and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable, and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.
Thomas More
Look to the nervous system as the key to maximum health.
Galen
I know positively - yes Rieux I can say I know the world inside out as no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest- health integrity purity if you like - is a product of the human will of vigilance that must never falter. The good man the man who infects hardly anyone is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power a never ending tension of the mind to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux it's a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us who want to get the plague out of their systems feel such desperate weariness a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
Albert Camus
As his mind becomes purer and his emotions come under control, his thoughts become clearer and his instincts truer. As he learns to live more and more in harmony with his higher Self, his body's natural intuition becomes active of itself. The result is that false desires and unnatural instincts which have been imposed upon it by others or by himself will become weaker and weaker and fall away entirely in time. This may happen without any attempt to undergo an elaborate system of self-discipline on his part: yet it will affect his way of living, his diet, his habits. False cravings like the craving for smoking tobacco will vanish of their own accord; false appetites like the appetite for alcoholic liquor or flesh food will likewise vanish; but the more deep-seated the desire, the longer it will take to uproot it--except in the case of some who will hear and answer a heroic call for an abrupt change.
Paul Brunton
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
Albert Camus
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
G.K. Chesterton
Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.
Paul Brunton
No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.
Maimonides
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bfore Venus, censorious; before Mars, timid.
Michael Walzer
Before Venus, censorious; before Mars, timid.
Michael Walzer
An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.
Criss Jami
The First wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.
John Rawls
The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it.
Bertrand Russell
For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.
Jürgen Habermas
The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.
Socrates
Live out your life in truth and justice, tolerant of those who are neither true nor just.
Marcus Aurelius
If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.
Michael J. Sandel
One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.
Simone Weil
He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
Albert Camus
As he himself said, "I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of his criminal soul.
Albert Camus
High justice would in no way be debased if ardent love should cancel instantly the debts these penitents must satisfy.
Dante Alighieri
As long as you're scared you're on the plantation.
Cornel West
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
Henry David Thoreau
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, -"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart were hurried;Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
Henry David Thoreau
A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.
Henry David Thoreau