Quotes by Philosophers - Page 208

Do not seek victory, for victory in itself will not serve you. Seek to understand what made the victory possible.
Chris Matakas
I wanted to get to the most essential aspect of my being, and look around for a while. I wanted to explore what I am in my most basic self. I wanted to chip away at all of the nonsense I have acquired through my twenty-nine years on this earth. I wanted to find truth. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. Jiu Jitsu has peeled the veil of daily life, and has shown me what lies beyond the curtain. We willingly accept the chains that circumstance forces upon us, and we grow to find comfort in them. We attach various fetters of day-to-day living to our being, and we do so with a smile. We accept these constraints for they come in the way of comfort. We accept conformity for it appears the path of least resistance. We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves.
Chris Matakas
Jiu Jitsu gives each of us something that no other sport can. We have the opportunity to become truly great regardless of what circumstance fate has handed us. We have complete freedom and responsibility to achieve whatever level of mastery we wish.
Chris Matakas
We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves.
Chris Matakas
Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible.
Chris Matakas
If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.
Chris Matakas
Jiu Jitsu has shown me that we are not confined to the lot which we inherit. We are not bound to these fetters eternally. They are temporal. We can transcend them should we sincerely choose to. Sincere effort is in fact the rarest virtue among man.
Chris Matakas
Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.
Plato
To learn what I know I have burned more midnight oil than you have drunk wine.
Tommaso Campanella
No one ever pays to learn the most important things.
Neel Burton
Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato
My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.
Hermes Trismegistus
One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
Aristotle
Even when walking in the company of two other men, I am bound to be able to learn from them. The good points of the one I copy, the bad points of the other I correct in myself.
Confucius
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
On athleticism, God knows no favor. It seems rather he is in the business of teaching winners how to lose and losers how to win.
Criss Jami
Deal with people from whom you can learn
Baltasar Gracián
Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.
Noam Chomsky
He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.
Robert M. Pirsig
There is no more valuable skill than studentship. The farther we go down one area of human understanding, the more we see the corollaries that all activities share. Everything I do for the rest of my life, all the skills I acquire, will be made possible because of my time spent on the mats. It has revealed a symbiosis between all things that I never knew existed.
Chris Matakas
Every challenge presents a good chance for learning something new.
Gift Gugu Mona
Life is about discovering things worth dying for.
Criss Jami
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
Paulo Freire
When the Master entered the great temple he asked about everything. Someone said, ‘Who will say that this son of the man of Zou knows about ritual? When he enters the temple, he asks about everything’. The Master heard of it and said, ‘This is the ritual’.
Confucius
If I raise one corner for someone and he cannot come back with the other three, I do not go on.
Confucius
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions.
John Dewey
When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.
Antonin Sertillanges
The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.
Ivan Illich
I'm starting to think that my level of intrigue outweighs my fear of controversy.
Criss Jami
Those are fools however learnedWho have not learned to walk with the world.
Thiruvalluvar
had no need of a guide to learn ignorance
Voltaire
The humble ones are always learning and improving, and their secret is always that it's a secret.
Criss Jami
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.
John C. Lennox
To conclude, therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.
Francis Bacon
There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.
Criss Jami
The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.
Roger Bacon
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Charles Sanders Peirce
With too much pride a man cannot learn a thing. In and of itself, learning teaches you how foolish you are.
Criss Jami
An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?
Criss Jami
At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.
Confucius
We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
Henry David Thoreau
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!
Nikos Kazantzakis
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether be a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life.
Ayn Rand
Life is easier lived when lived for others.
Chris Matakas
But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
Jostein Gaarder
Take one minute every day and think hard about your life. You will always change for the best.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Living exists when life lives through us … life is a living now!
Bruce Lee
Some people start to live when they die
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Sometimes the rope seems the only option when at the bottom of the pit. Climb it to safety.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
What's the use of life without health? It's like living dead
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You can truly live if you can see yourself centuries after you have died. Just imagine it. What will people remember about you, how will your grave look like? How will your children live, etc.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Every life is a unique random business
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't look for meaning in life. It was meant to be lived not understood
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you still have fear, you love life
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Nature has endowed us with some measure of insanity to cope with the realities of daily life
Bangambiki Habyarimana