Quotes by Philosophers - Page 244

Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.
Lao Tzu
Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.
Marcus Aurelius
If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.
Criss Jami
...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....
Aldous Huxley
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Simone Weil
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
Denis Diderot
As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word love has been so abused by publicity and advertisements that we no longer know really what it means.
Jean Vanier
A person acquainted with the true principles of this science, who preserves his Dharma (virtue or religious merit), his Artha (worldly wealth) and his Kama (pleasure or sensual gratification), and who has regard to the customs of the people, is sure to obtain the mastery over his senses. In short, an intelligent and knowing person attending to Dharma and Artha and also to Kama, without becoming the slave of his passions, will obtain success in everything that he may do.
Mallanaga Vātsyāyana
But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations
Bertrand Russell
Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.
Isaiah Berlin
In the modern Christian attempt to take a stand as Christ did, and maybe for others, win the approval of the world, the Christian will often think that it consists of targeting and demoralizing fellow Christians and only fellow Christians. It is one thing to stand against religious hypocrisy when one sees it, but it is another to go on snorting at anything or anyone who might seem 'too Christian' to us. The irony is that by doing this we are further advocating hypocrisy and 'half-hearted Christians'.
Criss Jami
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Ayn Rand
The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values—something whose like has never been seen on earth
Friedrich Nietzsche
When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties.
José Ortega y Gasset
Men seek a great deal, but fatally close, albeit very different, is one's pride in proving oneself right with one's zeal for finding the truth.
Criss Jami
Music is not my life. My life is music.
Criss Jami
No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does.
Michel de Montaigne
For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways?
Aristotle
Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.
Aristotle
It might come a time to not follow your passion, so to speak, although it must be prioritized. It may be the case that your passion will serve as the medic, your peace of mind, alongside a higher calling, with your higher calling being the point man.
Criss Jami
…I am left with lessthan one drop of my blood that does not tremble.I recognize the the signs of the old flame.
Dante Alighieri
Within her presence, I had once been usedto feeling—trembling—wonder, dissolution;but that was long ago. Still, though my soul,now she was veiled, could not see her directly,by way of hidden force that she could move,I felt the mighty power of old love.
Dante Alighieri
The true soldier fights
G.K. Chesterton
God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.
Criss Jami
What I Have Lived ForThree passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Bertrand Russell
Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.
Ayn Rand
Passion is the driving element of purpose. When one is possessed with it, labor is not perceived as toil - it is revealed as love.
T.F. Hodge
Indulge your passion for science…but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
David Hume
I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them.
Criss Jami
My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.
Raoul Vaneigem
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.
Will Durant
Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
José Ortega y Gasset
Do not make passion an argument for truth! - O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were innocence; when in struggle, intoxication, courage, hope, you are beside yourself and beyond all doubting; when you decree: 'he who is not beside himself as we are can in no way know what and where truth is!' How you thirst to discover people of your belief in this condition - it is that of intellectual vice - and ignite your flame at their torch! Oh your deplorable martyrdom! Oh your deplorable victory of the sanctified lie! Must you inflict so much suffering upon yourself? - Must you?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky
Georges Bataille
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion
Mikhail Bakunin
To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.
Confucius
What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.
Robert C. Solomon
Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame;It is the reflex of our earthly frame,That takes its meaning from the nobler part,And but translates the language of the heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
Henry Home
It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.
Edmund Burke
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.
Criss Jami
I felt for the tormented whirlwindsDamned for their carnal sinsCommitted when they let their passions rule their reason.
Dante Alighieri
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
Albert Camus
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Albert Camus
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
Aldous Huxley
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. –Aristotle
Aristotle
Good philosophy is always hate speech to evil doers.
Stefan Molyneux
I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Frequent risk-takers have had their fair shares of failures and successes, hence, being confident in reaching their goals, they will usually seem insensitive to whether or not they look foolish or cool to other people.
Criss Jami
When you become healthy, courageous, and hopeful, following your conscience becomes much easier. When people are healthy, courageous, and hopeful, it's difficult to bend their mind and will. They will speak out what they believe, and stand up and do what is right even when it means a loss to them.
Ilchi Lee
Dreams and freedom are the same. In order for them to be, they come with a price.
Criss Jami
He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.
Albert Camus
The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you free.
Swami Vivekananda
Your love is as stable as you are: It's not about how good a person makes you feel, but rather what good you can do for them.
Criss Jami
The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.
Neel Burton
And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.
G.K. Chesterton