Quotes by Philosophers - Page 175

I have frequently experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I have emerged from it not by any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action.
Bertrand Russell
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
William Kingdon Clifford
Napoleon the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself.
Otto Weininger
Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.
Albert Camus
Think wisely before you exercise an action. Having done so however, never look back and regret. That would be a shame
Thiruvalluvar
A saw by itself holds no value, but when coupled with your labor can clear forests.
Chris Matakas
It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
Aristotle
Come on, shake off the covers of this sloth, for sitting softly cushioned, or tucked in bed, is no way to win fame.
Dante Alighieri
The door to success may be a few steps away but you still have to walktowards it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God performs miracles, but even for a man to walk on water, action is required.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.(Pluck the day [for it is ripe], trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.)
Horace
When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.
Ayn Rand
...were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man’s foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels...
Ayn Rand
What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
Emil M. Cioran
A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.
A.C. Grayling
Ji Wenzi always thought thrice before acting. Hearing this the Master said, "Twice is enough.
Confucius
Be cautious of every motive behind any action, because not every smile is genuine; sometimes it's just a grin.
Gift Gugu Mona
The word of God is more powerful when put into action than when only spoken.
Gift Gugu Mona
But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
Immanuel Kant
Tolerance never exists without negative judgment. It is the sentiment of having a negative opinion about something yet still putting up with it.
Criss Jami
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
Every human activity can be put at the service of the divine and of love. We should all exercise our gift to build community.
Jean Vanier
Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.
Jean Vanier
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.
Aristotle
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Jacques Derrida
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
John Stuart Mill
Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.
Aldous Huxley
Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.
Aldous Huxley
Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.
Olaf Stapledon
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation)
Stanisław Lem
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
Aldous Huxley
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley
One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.
Stanisław Lem
Read books when you are free, read minds when you are'nt....but do read...
Rabindranath Tagore
I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance ofthe generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.
Stanisław Lem
Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.
Olaf Stapledon
He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
Aldous Huxley
I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.
Olaf Stapledon
We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.
Stanisław Lem
I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
Voltaire
I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
Stanisław Lem
Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
Aldous Huxley
And the Buddha pointed out that his confusion was justified, for 'the dharma is profound, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond the sphere of logic, subtle, and to be understood by the wise'. The reason for this is that it is not readily comprehended by one who holds a different view and has different learnings and inclinations, different involvements and instruction. It is clear from this statement that the conception of nibbāna in beyond logical reasoning, not because it is an Ultimate Reality transcending logic, but because logic or reason, being the 'slave of passions', makes it difficult for one who has a passion for an alien tradition to understand the conception of nibbāna.
David J. Kalupahana
To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?
Pascal Mercier
The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.
Alain de Botton
Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself -- to be is to be related.
Bruce Lee
[I would] rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
Democritus
A high self-esteem having artist works hard to be understood. A low self-esteem having artist works hard to be agreed with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the materials of his work, during reading separates out again the unformed and the formed aspects of the book—and if the reader were to work through the book according to his own idea, a second reader would refine it still more, with the result that, since the mass that had been worked through would constantly be poured into fresh vessels, the mass would finally become an essential component—a part of the active spirit.Through impartial rereading of his book the author can refine his book himself. With strangers the particular character is usually lost, because the talent of fully entering into another person’s idea is so rare. Often even in the author himself. It is not a sign of superior education and greater powers to justifiably find fault with a book. When receiving new impressions, greater sharpness of mind is quite natural.
Novalis
Just as we will never grasp the full meaning of God, we will also never grasp the full meaning of love.
Thomas Jay Oord
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
Herbert Spencer
Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysiqueWhen he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.
Voltaire
Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural.
Edvard Westermarck
Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.
Gian-Carlo Rota
Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.
Gian-Carlo Rota
What I have sought is to understand what has been said.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy