Quotes by Philosophers - Page 220

People speak even after their death. Only do speak those who have recorded their speech in writing before they die, the rest go silent forever
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals
Bangambiki Habyarimana
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]
Alfred North Whitehead
You cannot write if you are not on fire
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You cannot write if you are not angry
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You never know what you will write until you write it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Write it as you see in your own perspective, you may be right or wrong but then what, that's how you see it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You can edit what you write. Why not edit what you say? If it hurts somebody, you can still offer an apology or withdraw your statements
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Able writers let us into their minds and show us how they think and by that open our minds to ourselves
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Sometimes I have a good idea, something I wish I could remember, and instead of writing it down, commit it to my memory only to disappear when I needed it. Write your ideas as they come, if you wait it will be too long and you may not recover it. It may get destroyed as it is to seed to and fro in the ever rushing river of our thoughts
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise
Bangambiki Habyarimana
. If you want to write, just write anything that comes into your mind. You will be surprised at how you can force inspiration to stand on your side.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A writer is never alone, he is always with himself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I am what I have ever read
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The world would have been a better place if some men had just shut their mouths.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Creativity happens only when ego is absent,when you are relaxed, in deep rest, when there is really no desire to do something. Suddenly you are gripped;some unknown force overwhelms you,takes possession of you.
Osho
Consciously or not, we feel and internalize what the space tells us about how to work. When you walk into most offices, the space tells you that it's meant for a group of people to work alone. Closed-off desks sprout off of lonely hallways, and in a few obligatory conference rooms a huge table ensures that people are safely separated from one another.
David Kelley
It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority.
Criss Jami
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.
G.K. Chesterton
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.
G.K. Chesterton
If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas ... and I have thus found remote analogies and relations which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis.
Kenneth J.W. Craik
You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter...having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.
Criss Jami
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
Robert M. Pirsig
The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.
Heraclitus
I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.
Slavoj Žižek
Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.
Criss Jami
When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.
Criss Jami
Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.
Criss Jami
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it.
Henry David Thoreau
The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything that happens, happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.
Marcus Aurelius
Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.
Paul Ricœur
It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.
Mircea Eliade
O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.
Jostein Gaarder
[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.
Richard M. Weaver
since destiny always rings three times...
Muriel Barbery
The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy.
Criss Jami
Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.
Alfred North Whitehead
we are not here on earth to change our destiny but to fulfill it.
Guy Finley
The DoveFly your flight my dear doveSing your song, make it reach the oceanI want my freedomI want to live in peaceI want to sing your songTo have your wingsTo be able to flyI want my destiny to leave the path that it is taking now.
Eduardo Carrasco
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Albert Camus
... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.
Sri Aurobindo
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Albert Camus
Destiny is not what you become but what you do with it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The consequence model, the logical one, the amoral one, the one which refuses any divine intervention, is a problem really for just the (hypothetical) logician. You see, towards God I would rather be grateful for Heaven (which I do not deserve) than angry about Hell (which I do deserve). By this the logician within must choose either atheism or theism, but he cannot possibly through good reason choose anti-theism. For his friend in this case is not at all mathematical law: the law in that 'this equation, this path will consequently direct me to a specific point'; over the alternative and the one he denies, 'God will send me wherever and do it strictly for his own sovereign amusement.' The consequence model, the former, seeks the absence of God, which orders he cannot save one from one's inevitable consequences; hence the angry anti-theist within, 'the logical one', the one who wants to be master of his own fate, can only contradict himself - I do not think it wise to be angry at math.
Criss Jami
A coward: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition and believes he was destined to accept it that way
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are confident that evil can never happen to us until it does
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber
I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.
Simone de Beauvoir
Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.
Simone de Beauvoir
Resign your destiny to higher powers.
William James
Do not feel surprise at being schooled amid toil: you are being schooled for a wondrous destiny.
Augustine of Hippo