Quotes by Philosophers - Page 182

One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H. Gass
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Umberto Eco
So far, therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the opposite person. . . . It is therefore a science founded on nescience. . . . This science, alone of sciences, must, by all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience. . . . It is therefore peculiarly and alone science of darkness.
John Ruskin
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Then the Miller fell off his horse.
Geoffrey Chaucer
This is Nimrod, because of whose vile plan the world no longer speaks a single tongue.
Dante Alighieri
There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
Aldous Huxley
[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,
Karl Marx
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.
G.K. Chesterton
For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?
Alan W. Watts
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
G.K. Chesterton
I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.
Marshall McLuhan
[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.
Thomas More
When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.
Rabindranath Tagore
You don’t have any problems — only this much has to be understood. This very moment you can drop all problems. because they are your creations. Have another look at your problems: the deeper you look, the smaller they will appear. Go on looking at them and by and by they will start disappearing. Go on gazing and suddenly you will find there is emptiness — a beautiful emptiness surrounds you. Nothing to do, nothing to be, because you are already that.
Osho
Let us give future generations the gift of Earth citizenship by first giving it to ourselves.
Ilchi Lee
There's great peace in surrendering to principles
Stefan Molyneux
Add these affirmations:"Bright LifeParticles are energizing my body.""Every cell in my body vibrates with energy and health.
Ilchi Lee
We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.
Albert Camus
If you want to heal Heal othersAnd smile or weepAt this happy reversal of fate
Muriel Barbery
Only absolute simplicity can resolve a horrible complication; only a state free from psychology can heal psychological connections, and only a lucid brain can let go of a compulsive thought.
Shai Tubali
I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.
Albert Camus
The doctor of the future will be oneself.
Albert Schweitzer
When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues3. Admire themselves for living up to itBrutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.
John R. Perry
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
Susan Sontag
There is no love that is not self-love
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Moreover, you can’t stand so much as an hour of your own companyor spend your leisure properly; you avoid yourself like a truantor fugitive, hoping by drink or sleep to elude Angst.But it’s no good, for that dark companion stays on your heels
Horace
Faith in Providence is faith in one's own worth, … [H]ence also false humility, religious arrogance, which, it is true, does not rely on itself, but only because it commits the care of itself to the blessed God. God … wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: … God's love for me [is] nothing else than my own self-love deified.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Always distance yourself from gossip, because it is the worst form of self-disruption.
Gift Gugu Mona
Though our castes and institutions are apparently linked with our religion, they are not so. These institutions have been necessary to protect us as a nation, and when this necessity for self-preservation will no more exist, they will die a natural death. But the older I grow, the better I seem to think of these time-honored institutions of India. There was a time when I used to think that many of them were useless and worthless; but the older I grew, the more I seem to feel a diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment of the experience of centuries. A child of but yesterday, destined to die the day after tomorrow, comes to me and asks me to change all my plans; and if I hear the advice of that baby and change all my surroundings according to his ideas, I myself should be a fool, and no one else. Much of the advice that is coming to us from different countries is similar to this. Tell these wiseacres: "I will hear you when you have made a society yourselves. You cannot hold on to one idea for two days, you quarrel and fail; you are born like moths in the spring and die like them in five minutes. You come up like bubbles and burst like bubbles too. First form a stable society like ours. First make laws and institutions that remain undiminished in their power through scores of centuries. Then will be the time to talk on the subject with you, but till then, my friend, you are only a giddy child.
Swami Vivekananda
Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.
Alain de Botton
To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.
Bertrand Russell
Saepa stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturas. (Turn the stylus [to erase] often if you would write something worthy of being reread.)
Horace
To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!
Gian-Carlo Rota
There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.
Plato
Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis.(Whatever advice you give, be brief.)
Horace
My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
Robert M. Pirsig
If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?
Ayn Rand
What need of prompt or hint when it is open to yourself to discern what needs to be done - and, if you can see your way, to follow it with kind but undeviating intent. If you cannot see the way, hold back and consult your best advisors. if some other factors obstruct this advice, proceed on your present resources, but with cautious deliberations, keeping always to what seems just. Justice is the best aim, as any failure is in fact a failure of justice.A man following reason in all things combines relaxation with initiative, spark with composure.
Marcus Aurelius
It is a sign of arrogance to be mad at someone for not acting as per your advice, especially if it was unsolicited.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them.
Neel Burton
Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense
Baltasar Gracián
...we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life.
René Descartes
Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does notfear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any commonprizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight thething that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergymanwho gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on hisdeath-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I cangive you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strikeupwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.
G.K. Chesterton
For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.
Baltasar Gracián
I am billionaire bold bright omnipotent lively determined to go within to win opening my omnific eyes to realize wisdom innovation naturalizes…My cascading flow of financial love lavishly streams gold bars as I realize gold is intrinsic wealth as my intuitive imagination is my intrinsic innovations…
Robert A. Wilson
Personal growth is not like the development of a skill. It does not take place in observable increments that can be measured and charted. Indeed, as we have seen, when we're growing in sensitivity, generosity, and compassion, we're not aware of it, because we're not focusing on ourselves. The recovery of emotional freedom simply does not have the quality, for most of us, of a controllable sequence of transformations. It's more a career of discovering futher and further weaknesses and shedding them in turn.
C. Terry Warner
By becoming a black belt, you will become whatever it is you wanted to be in the first place, and Jiu Jitsu will have served its aim.
Chris Matakas
we must remember that the end of personal mastery is service to others.
Chris Matakas
In my own life, I have always viewed personal mastery as simply a medium through which I become capable of providing more service toward my fellow man.
Chris Matakas
I can think of no more worthwhile aim than pursuing mastery in this craft while transcending one's own limitations.
Chris Matakas
Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.
Susan Neiman
In whatever we do, we should be investing in ourselves and not our jobs. Everything I have ever pursued has been for the sole goal of who I was becoming in its achievement. I competed and fought because of the man I became. This is the only worthwhile victory. You cannot take the trophies with you.
Chris Matakas
The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.
Umberto Eco
Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.
Peter Rollins
Gino refilled my glass. “What a night. Booze, broads, and a barroom brawl.
Michael Murphy
It's never too late to achieve your dreams
A.E. Taylor
We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull.
Alan W. Watts
It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.
Criss Jami