Quotes by Philosophers - Page 26

A seemingly simple task like taking a bath or wearing a condom feels like multitasking to someone who suffers from hemiplegia or has only one hand.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most human beings strongly believe that money is way less important than the life of a human being, but in reality five hundred, fifty, or even five dollars are way more important to the lives of most human beings than the lives of most human beings.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A relationship is likely to last way longer, if each partner convinces or has convinced themselves that they do not deserve their partner, even if that is not true.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most of us cling to life as if our existence were a result of our deed or choice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bigheadedness is usually a symptom of small-mindedness.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To ask a man whether or not he has a girlfriend is to talk about his sex life. If you disagree with that, then how in the name of God do you differentiate between a man’s girlfriend and a girl that is a friend to the man?
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most sane human beings who have managed to attain and retain fame each uses it to dramatically increase their name’s chances of being remembered until Jesus comes back, since their heart cannot do what they consciously or unconsciously lust for, that is to say, for it to beat until Jesus returns.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The average adult has had sex innumerable times more than they have formed an opinion of their own.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We, in the interest of the so-called progress, have been persuaded to leave the production and at times the cooking of our food to companies whose owners and employees make a living by exploiting our busyness or laziness and our innate hunger to continue living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Patriotism is the narcissism of countries.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bling" is not an indication of riches. It is a product of value-based spending, to enrich the pockets of those outside of ones sphere of influence...the haves' bleeding the have-nots'.
T.F. Hodge
Having beef with someone is unnecessary and avoidable. Whatever the issue, if not positive, it is an opportunity to cut the excess fat from an unhealthy dietary network. Simply excuse yourself from the table of negativity and lean forward in peace.
T.F. Hodge
When spontaneous demoralizing thoughts seep into your conscience, don't trip...allowing them to fester. These are random tests of your conviction and determination. Large or small, your reaction to such intrusions is a defining moment for which no one else, but you, can mitigate.
T.F. Hodge
Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity.
T.F. Hodge
Search for the stranger inside you, forgotten even by your death.
Sorin Cerin
How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.
Jean Meslier
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
Alain de Botton
The idea that all souls are mortal is the only notion surely terminating love and all its forms.
Criss Jami
the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.
Umberto Eco
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
Lao Tzu
Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The power of hope! Even a lack of ambition can, for a time, pay off as a necessary facet, as long as hope outweighs it.
Criss Jami
I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.
Criss Jami
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Richard M. Rorty
Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.
Denis de Rougemont
Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.
Criss Jami
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like.
Bart Schultz
If the entire world sought to make itself worthy of happiness rather than make itself happy, then the entire world would be happy.
Criss Jami
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonourable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. It is better, far better, that we admitted, if it were possible, a thousand devils to roam at large, and to preach publicly the doctrine of devils, if there were any such, than that we permitted one such impostor and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God in his mouth, and have credit among us.Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called revealed religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man? The lies of the Bible have been the cause of the one, and the lies of the Testament of the other.
Thomas Paine
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.
Seneca
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Karl Marx
A day in a storm strengthens you more than a thousand in sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is in vain to hide a fruitful seed in fertile soil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The poor can dream. The weak can hope. The helpless can strive. The powerless can rise.
Matshona Dhliwayo