Quotes by Philosophers - Page 221

Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Lao Tzu
When you surround yourself with dramatic people, your life will be driven by drama instead of destiny.
Gift Gugu Mona
Whatever we do and are, we are given the means thereof
Bangambiki Habyarimana
How bitter they cry in need, those who refuse to help others in trouble!
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Fate seems to scourge some people with her furies, while it ravishes others with her graces with none having done absolutely nothing to suffer the furies or merit the graces.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Condition A must be in place for action B to take place
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Never get angry against fate, she is looking for someone to crush, why put a spotlight on yourself?
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are the products of fate, from beginning to end
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Those who think fate is against them have already crucified themselves. They have already decided what fate should do with them
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Nothing in nature happens voluntarily. Everything is forced to happen. There is a hidden hand that forces things to move.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are nothing but bricks from our cultural molds
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We are dust furrowed by the painful plough of Destiny to give birth to the emptiness of a time.
Sorin Cerin
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Umberto Eco
Listen to the advice of your own Destiny! All is a given!
Sorin Cerin
We live behind the closed doors of our own destiny.
Sorin Cerin
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.
Miguel de Unamuno
The future is not a scenario written, which we only have to act out; it is a work which we have to create.
Roger Garaudy
But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.
Ayn Rand
The willing, Destiny guides them. The unwilling, Destiny drags them.
Seneca
Character is destiny
Heraclitus
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No more roundabout discussions of what makes a good man. Be one!
Marcus Aurelius
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Thomas Carlyle
Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together.
Osho
I would more appropriately define mastery as the technical ability possible within the constraints of your particular existence.
Chris Matakas
Jiu Jitsu is the vehicle. Not the road.
Chris Matakas
If all emotions are common coin, then what is unique to the good man?To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God – saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if the others don’t acknowledge it – this life lived in simplicity, humility, cheerfulness – he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.
Marcus Aurelius
One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves.
Pascal Mercier
When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible?No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.
Marcus Aurelius
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.
Augustine of Hippo
The only way to consistently perform at your potential is to ask: Am I better than I was yesterday?
Chris Matakas
Devoting yourself to a particular art is invaluable. The art becomes our vehicle with which we drive down the road of life. We use this vehicle to learn about ourselves and this place, to conquer fears, to become more of what we already are. In my own life, I have found most valuable the transferable skills of learning from jiu jitsu to all other facets of day to day study. In devoting myself with such commitment to this art, in undertaking the task of understanding jiu jitsu to whatever degree by circumstance allows, I have unknowingly learned how to learn.
Chris Matakas
As an instructor, my goal has always been to use Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to help our students achieve their goals, whatever the case may be. I have yet to find a better vehicle for growth, and the moment I do I will certainly pursue it with the rivaled fervor that I approached Jiu Jitsu.
Chris Matakas
I can think of no more worthwhile aim than pursuing mastery in this craft while transcending one’s own limitations.
Chris Matakas
I am a better son, brother, friend, and teacher because of the daily sacrifice and effort I put toward my craft. WIth all the advantages modern society has created, it has left us wanting. We no longer need to struggle to survive. Our basic needs are now met with minimal physical strife or mental challenge. Technology and the advances of man have left us over-stressed and under-performing. We are now forced to actively pursue our struggles. If we do not go out of our way to stretch our comfort zones and grow, no one nor nature will do it for us.
Chris Matakas
There is an undeniable truth that as one progresses further in his understanding of a craft the rest of his life progresses along with it. This symbiotic relationship between all things is experienced on a daily basis, but rarely articulated through conscious thought.
Chris Matakas
My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist.
Chris Matakas
Self-improvement is generally a removal of a vice rather than an acquisition of a virtue.
Chris Matakas
The major events in our lives receive the entire spotlight, but ultimately your life will be defined by the same handful of choices you make each day.
Chris Matakas
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You are received the way you present yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.
Maimonides
A wise man will be master of his mind, a fool will be its slave.
Publilius Syrus
Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible…Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal…
William James
Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.
Augustine of Hippo
In the event of a total loss of direction in life, be sure to sort our your own shit before you start telling people what to do.
A.C. Ping
The never-ending task of self improvement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and--what will perhaps make you wonder more--it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
Seneca
If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.
Albert Camus
All human activity is prompted by desire.
Bertrand Russell
There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here at all.
Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke
Even kings and emperors, with mountains of property and oceans of wealth - these are not even equal to an ant, who does not forget God.
Guru Nanak
The most challenging aspect of living is staying in your lane.
T.F. Hodge
Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.
Sri Aurobindo
For each and every person, our Lord and Master provides sustenance. Why are you so afraid, O mind? The flamingos fly hundreds of miles, leaving their young ones behind. Who feeds them, and who teaches them to feed themselves? Have you ever thought of this in your mind?
Guru Nanak
I Drink. I Burn. I Dream.And Sometimes, I tell Stories !
Hélène Cixous
The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself.
Criss Jami