Quotes by Philosophers - Page 214

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else's simply because I know why I said what I said.
Criss Jami
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.
Aldous Huxley
Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan W. Watts
You can receive all the compliments in the world, but that won't do a thing unless you believe it yourself.
Criss Jami
One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.
G.K. Chesterton
But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?
Umberto Eco
In these circumstances they did what most of us do, and, being ignorant of the truth, persuaded themselves into believing what they wished to believe.
Arrian
I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.
Criss Jami
Still, one can be honest yet quite mistaken.
Criss Jami
I pity the man who praises God only when things go his way.
Criss Jami
You never depart from us, but yet, only with difficulties do we return to You.
Augustine of Hippo
An agnostic is a creature that is religiously skeptical whenever it is told that God exists … or that He doesn’t.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
but even if true belief about matters of importance is of intrinsic value, it does not follow that the value of truth should always trump every other value with which it might compete.
Tim Bayne
It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.
G.K. Chesterton
Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe, because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act.
J.P. Moreland
You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do...and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.
Criss Jami
Doubt is your intellectual conscience pleading with you to be honest with yourself.
Peter Boghossian
Stop blaming evil on the Devil, blame it on the Creator of everything, if you don't understand, ask Him or at least hope that someday He will reveal it to you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Can you die for a false idea? Yes. The reason you die is that you believe it’s not a false idea
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are all sinful. Trouble is that some men consider themselves less sinful than others or holier than others.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The best way to earn paradise in the afterlife is to create it in your life and in the life of your neighbor
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I don't believe god has a darling tribe or nation, all tribes and nations are his darlings.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The true god has no beginning and has no end, it was not begotten and cannot beget, it cannot die and resurrect. He is responsible of everything good and evil and he is the sustainer of life. If he can save he saves all without distinction
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It's true not because it's beyond doubt, but because we believe it to be true. We make it true. We are safe as long as no one can disprove us
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I believe despite my doubts, belief gives me power reason takes away
Bangambiki Habyarimana
False belief is more emotional than true belief
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Sometimes we believe it is truth, not because it is truth but because it has been made truth by law or tradition. Some of those truths are nothing but dogmatized myths
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are like other animals; we live and die as they do. If there is any afterlife, I believe we are in together.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.
Sam Harris
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent?Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
J.Krishnamurti
I am not convinced of the argument, 'I want to believe; it is only those awful Christians I hate. They get in the way of my belief.' If you hate Christians more than you love Christ, you do not love Christ. It comes to mind the question, 'If you do not love your brother or sister whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen?
Criss Jami
Many of us are literally prone to believing the most blatantly nonsensical untruths. There are some opinions and some beliefs so incredibly moronic, you actually feel stupid for not believing them; and it's probably because in giving the benefit of the doubt you self-doubt, you convince yourself into lame passivity and blind acceptance, you tell yourself, 'Maybe I'm just missing something here.
Criss Jami
Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.
Sam Harris
I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
A.J. Ayer
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
One person with a belief is worth 99 people who have only interests.
John Stuart Mill
Do not believe anything merely because you are told it is so, because others believe it, because it comes from Tradition, or because you have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect. Believe, take for your doctrine, and hold true to that, which, after serious investigation, seems to you to further the welfare of all beings. (47)
Jean-Yves Leloup
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell
I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
Stanisław Lem
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert Camus
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William Kingdon Clifford
The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.
Thomas Paine
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,but it is belief that is the positive, it is beliefthat sustains thought and holds the world together.
Søren Kierkegaard
It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
Sam Harris
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
Søren Kierkegaard
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Thomas Paine
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the
Susan Sontag
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan W. Watts
Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars...
Oswald Spengler