Quotes by Philosophers - Page 24

We are reformers in Spring and Summer in Autumn and Winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is more easy to get a favor from fortune than to keep it.
Publilius Syrus
Reason is the mistress and queen of all things.
Cicero
Many are destined to reason wrongly others not to reason at all: and others to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Plato
Reason deserves to be called a prophet for in showing up the consequence and effect of our actions in the present does it not tell us what the future will be?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
Blaise Pascal
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality because reality is a spirit.
G.K. Chesterton
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
To seek fulfillment is to invite frustration.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power but for the passionate sense of the potential for the eye which ever young and ardent sees the possible ... what wine is so sparkling so fragrant so intoxicating as possibility!
Søren Kierkegaard
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
Henry David Thoreau
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
If you aspire to the highest place it is no disgrace to stop at the second or even the third place.
Cicero
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
Bernard de Fontenelle
Learn to ... be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.
Jean Vanier
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.
Albert Camus
One must not hope to be more than one can be.
Nicolas de Chamfort
We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. That man is best who has fewest.
Horace
Vex not thy spirit at the course of things they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.
Marcus Aurelius
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Never let life's hardships disturb you ... no one can avoid problems not even saints or sages.
Nichiren Daishonen
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Reading maketh a full man.
Sir Francis Bacon
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
G.K. Chesterton
In quarreling the truth is always lost.
Syrus
It is not every question that deserves an answer.
Syrus
The punishment of criminals should be of use when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.
Voltaire
Depression is rage spread thin.
Paul Tillich
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
G.K. Chesterton
I shall always consider the best guesser the best prophet.
Cicero
Prosperity makes some friends and many enemies.
Vauvenargues
What men want is not knowledge but certainty.
Bertrand Russell
The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
John Locke
Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact but a legal fiction.
Max Stirner
Property is theft.
Proudhon
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
William James
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Henry David Thoreau
There are no facts only interpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who is the most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in the performance of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is.
Voltaire
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner and hear what he had to say and make fun of him.
Thomas Carlyle
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
George Santayana
A thousand things advance nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat that is progress.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
New roads new ruts.
G.K. Chesterton