Quotes by Philosophers - Page 209

Life becomes unbearable when, instead of living it, you stop to think about it.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is a war. Guerrilla warfare, the strategy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is so sweet. A man will even kiss the a** of his enemy to have his head spared
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is existence with meaning
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is a stampede to get to the top
Bangambiki Habyarimana
There are two important days in your life. The day you discovered you were alive and the day you forgot about it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is like water in a glass. Drop by drop the glass empties.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Somethings are simply better left the way they are.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The hardest thing in life is a man to be honest with himself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Your true beliefs are known in agony
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is an invisible stampede
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It takes all of our life to learn how to live, and – something that may surprise you more – it takes just as long to learn how to die.
Seneca
Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.
Michel de Montaigne
I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance.
Gary Hayden
However smart and determined you are, your life is always going to consist of light and darkness, joy and sadness, good or bad, up and down, yang and yin.
Gary Hayden
What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!
Aldous Huxley
When you finally understand the meaning of life, you come to the conclusion it has none after all
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Most of our waking life is make believe. If there was a way to record every dream that crosses our minds, the true nature of humans would be laid bare
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Do you know why we show respect to life when it shows none to us? Family is the answer
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Water in, water out until there is no water to run and the riverbed runs dry. That's life
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life has no map; it's made of random events, always caused by something beyond your control.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Life is just a dream, to some it's a sweet dream, to others, a nightmare. But whatever it is, it's always short and dissipates quickly.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We live like sheep in line waiting to be slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. We eat and laugh and fight as we see those in front of us fall to the knife
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A small event as tiny as a drop of a pin can change the direction of your entire life
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don’t complain against life, it may hear you and double your suffering
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You will never really think hard about your life until your oxygen mask is taken away from you when you are at the bed of the ocean. At that exact moment, your true self will be revealed. You will really know if you are a believer or an atheist, whether you really love life or hate it as you usually say. All your claims will be tested
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We don't know where we come from and where we go, we fill the missing links with whatever our imaginations can provide us
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Then nothing became something, and I was born, and I wrought great havoc in the world in the time allotted to me, and I returned to nothingness
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.
Simone de Beauvoir
Remember, if you cannot live with yourself, you cannot live with anyone else. The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.
Osho
The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.
Marcus Aurelius
...throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To laugh often and much;to win the respect of intelligent peopleand the affection of children,to leave the world a better place,to know even one life has breathed easierbecause you have lived,this is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To neglect ones own ability to laugh is the greatest form of Blasphemy, for to laugh is to pray.
Ilyas Kassam
Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.
Dallas Willard
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
God loves his creatures, and he loves each one the more, the more it shares his own goodness, which is the first and primary object of his love. Therefore he wants the desires of his rational creatures to be fulfilled because they share most perfectly of all creatures the goodness of god.And his will is an accomplisher of things because he is the cause of things by his will. So it belongs to the divine goodness to fulfill the desires of rational creatures which are put to him in prayer.
Thomas Aquinas
Pray FOR positive outcomes, never ON perceived dilemmas
T.F. Hodge
(God's) nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate.
Dallas Willard
Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.” --Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard
How do we listen to his voice? With the ear of our heart. With love. Love has ears, as love has eyes. Just be there, and love him, and let him love you." (35). Easier said than done. "What will happen then? What will we hear? Let God take care of that. Seek only him, do not use him as a means to seek any other end. He is not your Santa, he is your Savior. I cannot tell you what he will give you, except for one thing: he will give you himself. He will give you more of himself the more you want him, that is, the more you love him. He wants to pour infinite riches into your soul; prayer is a way of opening up your soul so more of God can enter.
Peter Kreeft
It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it.
Josef Pieper
One common cause of this mistake of preferring to imagine and admire a great ideal instead of beginning to do little deeds is our impatience with little baby steps, our lack of humility.
Peter Kreeft
We pray to obey God, not to 'play God'. We pray, not to change God's mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to 'let God be God'. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask (Mt. 7:7).
Peter Kreeft
When we pray, instead of trying to produce love in our souls toward God, we should be basking in God's love for us. How foolish to stay indoors in the cold, dark little room off the self, trying to turn on the light and turn up the heat, when we can just go outside into God's glorious Sonlight and receive his rays! How silly to fuss with artificial tanning salons and lotions and lights when the Son is out!
Peter Kreeft
There is something in us that fears prayer as a maggot fears light. We must do violence to this voice, for it is not ourselves. It is our Enemy.
Peter Kreeft
Prayer is easier than we think. we want to think it is too hard or too high and holy for us, because that gives us an excuse for not doing it. This is false humility. We can all do it, even the most sinful, shallow, silly, and stupid of us.
Peter Kreeft
We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.
Peter Kreeft
God makes it easy to begin: just do it! God also makes it easy to progress in prayer, for he rewards our efforts with peace and joy. And he makes it easiest of all at the end, for it gradually becomes more natural and delightful.
Peter Kreeft
High and holy ambition--to be a saint--is not opposed to holy humility--total reliance on God's grace. Exactly the opposite. Ambition without humility is ambition that fails. It is pride, which goes before a fall (Prov 16:18). Humility without ambition is false humility.
Peter Kreeft
The single most important piece of advice about prayer is one word: Begin!
Peter Kreeft
Léon Bloy wrote: 'Life holds only one tragedy: not to have been a saint
Peter Kreeft
Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
Paul Evdokimov
Closing one’s eyes when praying doesn’t increase the odds of the prayer being answered. It merely decreases the odds of being distracted.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we "understand" when we pray.
James K.A. Smith
When the going gets tough: the poor close their eyes, the rich open their wallets.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Feel the energy, starting with your hands, and if you maintain the sensation of being connected to that energy as you pray, you can be more deeply immersed in your prayer. The reason is that the entire universe is composed of the energy you're feeling with your hands right now. When you maintain that feeling of connection with the universe as you pray for the great hopes and dreams cherished by your soul, you are broadcasting your prayer to the entire universe as your audience. If the whole universe is resonating with your dream and working with you to make your dream come true, wouldn't that lend great strength to you?
Ilchi Lee
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding. Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion.
Thomas Aquinas
How can you expect to dwell with God forever, if you so neglect and forsake him here?
Jonathan Edwards