Quotes by Philosophers - Page 188

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
Jean Baudrillard
Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.
Evan Thompson
The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.
Evan Thompson
To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
Peter Singer
I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things…My nature is designed entirely for brief habits…I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it…But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We have been so busy perfecting the means of travel that we have forgotten where we wanted to go.
Arthur M. Young
You will not live the life of royalty, if you don't understand the meaning of loyalty.
Gift Gugu Mona
God will let you into the battlefield so you can understand the meaning of victory.
Gift Gugu Mona
Meaning comes from the unknown, from the stranger, from the unpredictable that suddenly knocks at your door — a flower that suddenly blooms and you never expected it; a friend that suddenly happens to be on the street you were not waiting for; a love that blooms suddenly and you were not even aware that this was going to happen, you had not even imagined, not even dreamed. Then life has meaning. Then life has a dance. Then every step is happy because it is not a step filled with duty, it is a step moving into the unknown. The river is going towards the sea.
Osho
My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze
Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.
Paul Tillich
Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor whatshould possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.
Umberto Eco
if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The significance of life is living.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
Voltaire
Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
Voltaire
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
Albert Camus
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
Umberto Eco
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Jean-Paul Sartre
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan W. Watts
Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
Voltaire
There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed!
Augustine of Hippo
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain de Botton
To know yourself you must know the transience of your self.
Ilyas Kassam
To seek contentment is to release the novelty that lies within monotony
Ilyas Kassam
A truly free man is not free 'from' anything, nor free 'to' anything, he is just free. Free within himself.
Ilyas Kassam
Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.
Jim Holt
G. I. Gurdieff, "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"So-and-so-and-so-must-be; do-not-do-what-must-not-be. Mullah's favorite saying. p. 598
Gurdieff
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We have to serve ourself many years before we gain our own confidence.
Henry S. Haskins
Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality, is realized.
Adi Shankaracarya
We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.
Alain de Botton
In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.
István Aranyosi
To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is... The whole surface of consciousness - for consciousness -is- a surface - must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! So many dangers that the instinct comes too soon to "understand itself" --.Meanwhile, the organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down - it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole - one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, "goal," "aim," or "meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The inner self is as distinct from the outer self as heaven is from earth.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Live what you be, not what you see.
T.F. Hodge
Rumors run wild when one sacrifices for self and temporarily forsakes those who assume entitlement to one's persona.
T.F. Hodge
Pride can be friend, ego can be foe...depending on which one we choose, or not, to conquer.
T.F. Hodge
The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.
Rudolf Carnap
In silence you shall face self...and have respect.
T.F. Hodge
Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving.
Neel Burton
A man who rightly governs self, may also govern family without the crippling cowardice, crutch of control.
T.F. Hodge
A personal revolution is the consequence of confronting self - as is.
T.F. Hodge
The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.
Luce Irigaray
When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things...
René Descartes
Between you and you, let there be no secrets. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
You can be yourself without pursuing yourself. Have you ever seen a dog chase his own tail? He just runs in circles.
Criss Jami
It is the thought that the least efficient way of of finding either happiness or pleasure is to pursue them. Put in terms of happiness, we can see it like this: To be happy you must quite literally "lose yourself". You must lose yourself in some pursuit; you need to forget your own happiness and find other goals and projects, other objects of concern that might include the welfare of some other people, or the cure of the disease, or simply in the variety of everyday activities with their little successes and setbacks.
Simon Blackburn
When the self is not engaged in apprehending objects it becomes aware of itself.
Walter Terence Stace
The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.
William Barrett
Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically "meaningful," while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the "meaningless." Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch, but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being.
William Barrett
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
Criss Jami
When a man does not dwell in self, then things will of themselves reveal their forms to him. His movement is like that of water, his stillness like that of a mirror, his responses like those of an echo.
Zhuangzi