Quotes by Philosophers - Page 211

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Albert Camus
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
Susan Sontag
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.
Søren Kierkegaard
Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.
Rob Riemen
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Thomas Carlyle
The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.
Ayn Rand
Many who have learnedfrom Hesiod the countless namesof gods and monstersnever understandthat night and day are one
Heraclitus
And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
Hélène Cixous
The Master doesn't try to be powerful;thus he is truly powerful.The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;thus he never has enough.The Master does nothing,yet he leaves nothing undone.The ordinary man is always ding things,yet many more are left to be done.[…]Therefore the Master concerns himselfWith the depths and not the surface,With the fruit and not the flower.[…]Teaching without words,Performing without actions:That is the Master’s way.[…]The Master arrives without leaving,Sees the light without looking,Achieves without doing a thing.[…]The Master is above the people,And no one feels oppressed.She goes ahead of the people,And no feels manipulated.The whole world is grateful to her.Because she completes with no one,No one can complete with her.
Lao Tzu
It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.
Seneca
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
Bertrand Russell
There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
Horace
Utterances of cursed language defiles the hearts and souls of man and many.
T.F. Hodge
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Aldous Huxley
Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce" on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.
Gaston Bachelard
Should you care to write (and only the saints know why you should) you must needs have knowledge and art and magic - the knowledge of the music of words, the art of being artless, and the magic of loving your readers.
Kahil Gibran
But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.
Plato
Faeces by any other name would smell as gross
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished?
Francis Bacon
Intelligence is a way of thinking, not a choice of words.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
Ayn Rand
There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.
Owen Barfield
Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.
Pascal Mercier
I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I too endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by constant overuse. Do they still have any meaning?
Pascal Mercier
When your words enter the material world in the form of ink or on screen, you are immediately afforded the opportunity to judge their worth.
Chris Matakas
Just as the earth that bears the man who tills and digs it, to bear those who speak ill of them, is a quality of the highest respect.
Thiruvalluvar
Uttering foul words, while there are the sweetest of words, is like going for the unripe fruits while there are a lot of ripe ones.
Thiruvalluvar
Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.
Zhuangzi
Women's Tongues are as sharp as two-edged Swords, and wound as much, when they are anger'd.
Margaret Cavendish
Words make the intangible aspects of human experience communicable, and a single sentence can shatter our world view and assist us in the formulation of a new one.
Chris Matakas
Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature.
Chris Matakas
Quotes tell a story. A stringing together of a few words can leave you with an idea that changes the course of your life, and can direct you toward reaching your highest potential as a human. The story they tell is derived from the experience which inspired them, and it is our sharing that experience that allows for the quote to resonate so deeply within our being.
Chris Matakas
He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.
Ayn Rand
Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.
Ayn Rand
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.
Aldous Huxley
If you don’t stand sincere by your wordshow sincere can the people be?Take great care over words, treasure them.1.17
Lao Tzu
Words that speak of things close at hand and carry far-reaching implications – those are the good words.
Mencius
Words that defy reality are ominous. And it’s ominous reality that confronts those who would obscure the wise and worthy.
Mencius
Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
Bodhidharma
A bad word triggers another in your opponent. Be ready to reap what you plant
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You don't need to kill with a sword, the tongue can do equally a better job and police will not knock on your door
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.
Anaxagoras
In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.
Robert M. Pirsig
To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.
Robert M. Pirsig
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover the meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
There is a huge difference between those who follow Christ by words only and those who do so by action. The latter will always let you experience the steadfast love of God whenever you come into contact with them.
Gift Gugu Mona
Words are powerful, so use every word wisely to create a better world.
Gift Gugu Mona
Words have an immeasurable impact, they can either build or destroy so be careful of your words.
Gift Gugu Mona
Definitions create conditions.
Alfred Korzybski
For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
Søren Kierkegaard
Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the linguistic term `metathesis' is similar to the oncological term `metastasis'? What is the metathesis? Instead of `clasp' one says `claps.' Instead of `beloved' one says `bevoled.' It's the temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means the transposition or interchange, while metastasis indicates the change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it's the verb metatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It's the same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why I'm dying, Jacopo, and you know it.
Umberto Eco
Language is insight itself.
Confucius
He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words.
Pascal Mercier
Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.
Sorin Cerin
Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty