Quotes by Philosophers - Page 169

Religions, themselves, are (intellectual) blasphemies.
Kedar Joshi
The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
Alasdair MacIntyre
I do not know by what power I think; but well I know that I should never have thought without the assistance of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not at all doubt; but that it is impossible for God to communicate the faculty of thinking to matter, I doubt very much. I revere the Eternal Power, to which it would ill become me to prescribe bounds. I affirm nothing, and am contented to believe that many things are possible than are usually thought so".
Voltaire
Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
Sam Harris
Sustained negative flashbacks can stir a heart attack.
T.F. Hodge
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice.
John Stuart Mill
People stop thinking when they cease to read.
Denis Diderot
Our thoughts is what our life make it
Marcus Aurelius
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Mary Wollstonecraft
The very fact that you can observe this thinking mind is proof that you are not this thinking mind.
Chris Matakas
Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?
Ayn Rand
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
That all is as thinking makes it so – and you control your thinking. So remove your judgements whenever you wish and then there is calm - as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay.
Marcus Aurelius
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal
But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself.
Martin Heidegger
Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.
Martin Heidegger
every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind.
Hannah Arendt
I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.
Rousseau Jean-Jacques 1712-1778
Can you look at a flower without thinking?
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.
Erich Fromm
Thinking is itself, however, an adventure.
James V. Schall
As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
There are two ways to slide easily through life: Namely, to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking. The majority take the line of least resistance, preferring to have their thinking done for them; they accept ready-made individual, private doctrines as their own and follow them more or less blindly. Every generation looks upon its own creeds as true and permanent and has a mingled smile of pity and contempt for the prejudices of the past. For two hundred or more generations of our historical past this attitude has been repeated two hundred or more times, and unless we are very careful our children will have the same attitude toward us.
Alfred Korzybski
If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Dallas Willard
At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!
Ayn Rand
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
Bertrand Russell
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
Hannah Arendt
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
Lao Tzu
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
Voltaire
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.
Marcus Aurelius
While a creator does and must worship Man (which means his own highest potentiality; which is his natural self-reverence), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective). These are two entirely different conceptions, with entirely - (immensely and diametrically opposed) - different consequences.
Ayn Rand
...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroying, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were he in the tyrant's place, would intensify the torments of his enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed everyday on his orders. Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] Mandeville has a clear awareness that, with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason; but he has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that he wants to deny in men. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.
John N Gray
It is easier for a man to burn down his own house than to get rid of his prejudices.
Roger Bacon
When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.
Plato
There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.
Ernst Cassirer
To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.
Michel Foucault
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Heraclitus
You don’t tell a boy that he is a boy. You simply act like a man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” - The Narrator.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....
Jean-Paul Sartre
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
Stanisław Lem
He alone is a man who keeps his word:Not that he has one thing in the heart, and another on the tongue.
Guru Gobind Singh
To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
Humanity has determined it is supreme in the kingdom of animals, yet [the] beasts live a less tragic existence...and many of their tragedies are a consequence of so-called human brilliance.
T.F. Hodge
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, "a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
Eric Hoffer
Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.
José Ortega y Gasset
Intelligent people, as some say, in their openness, are indeed slow to criticize, but conversely, in their openness to the concerns of others, the genuine are slow to fret about being criticized.
Criss Jami
The knowledge of God without that of man's misery causes pride. The knowledge of man's misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery.
Blaise Pascal
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
Friedrich Schiller
Universe doesn't even know that you exist, so relax!
Carl William Brown
Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson