Quotes by Philosophers - Page 269

Character that is fruit-producing can be summed up in the mastery of these 5 qualities: morals, but a sense of humor; love, but respect for criticism; intelligence without pretense; humility without self-loathing; and a mind open, but with solid convictions.
Criss Jami
To be naive is to be unaware of how stupid and cruel other people are; but, by some definitions, ignorance is nearly the opposite of naivety in being a kind of cynicism, in being unaware of their intelligence and humanity. It seems to be a normal although unfortunate case that the great many of us consciously abhor ignorance in others yet subconsciously practice it ourselves: as naivety is apparent and well-known to inflict its damage upon oneself; whereas the alternative and the easier, ignorance, its damage upon others.
Criss Jami
Chapulier's Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it....The Great Mendacitor, for example, for nine years in charge of the Saturn meliorization project, did absolutely nothing on that planet, sending out piles of fake progress reports, invoices, requisition forms, and either bribed his supervisors or kept them in a state of electronic shock.
Stanisław Lem
Love sharpens intelligence, fear dulls it. Who wants you to be intelligent? Not those who are in power. How can they want you to be intelligent?—because if you are intelligent you will start seeing the whole strategy, their games. They want you to be stupid and mediocre. They certainly want you to be efficient as far as work is concerned, but not intelligent; hence humanity lives at the lowest, at the minimum of its potential.
Osho
We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.
William MacAskill
... He who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new... partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Just as trees need roots in the earth, man is also a tree and needs roots in existence or else he will live a very unintelligent life.
Osho
There’s no logical connection between being smart and having money.
Christopher Langan
Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
If you are intelligent, if you are alert, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.
Osho
Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
It is not that men become too intelligent for God,' says the Apologist, 'but rather they become too arrogant for intelligence.
Criss Jami
It is not enough to call yourself a 'free thinker' just because you can change your beliefs. A whole mess of people change their beliefs based on what is fashionable rather than what is factual, which, by always following the crowd, would be the complete opposite of the beauty of a free thinker.
Criss Jami
Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect.
René Girard
Behave like men, and not like witless sheep...
Dante Alighieri
The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.
G.K. Chesterton
It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.
Kedar Joshi
Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective.
Criss Jami
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.
Criss Jami
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
Alain de Botton
The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.
James Mackintosh
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
Norbert Wiener
But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.
Criss Jami
Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.
Criss Jami
Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.
Criss Jami
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Friedrich Schiller
I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.
Criss Jami
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Muriel Barbery
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
Blaise Pascal
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
Aldous Huxley
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
The sacrifices we make to stay healthy, to look good, the tasty foods we skip, the guilt trips, the exercising - all these things require great discipline, care, and even a paradoxical, self-denying self-love of sorts in order to be properly executed. However it is regretful that so many of us today are not as passionate about our spiritual holiness as we are about our physical health. They are indeed both important - we should worship in every aspect of our lives - and one even, in a sense, entails the other. Although, this disproportion in said priorities is still very much expected: we humans have always taken a liking to trendiness and the temporal side of things, doing what is judged vainly in the eyes of man before that which is judged vitally and eternally in the eyes of God (i.e. "cleaning the outside of one's cup while leaving a filthy inside"). But in a way, it all goes to show that the man who fully hates discipline hates himself fully; for within the spirit is where The Holy One judges true wellness or malady.
Criss Jami
There are those who feel that the world is ultimately moving closer to Truth and to prosperity as the times evolve; then there are those who feel that it is ultimately moving farther away from Truth and into self-destruction. From this, and if it were really that simplistic, one might get the impression that life gravitates slightly into two types of people whom which are diametrically opposed in spirit.
Criss Jami
For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that unless I believe, I shall not understand.
Anselm of Canterbury
For what the Spirit sees becomes a truthAnd what the soul imagines is made a world
Sri Aurobindo
A thinking puppet is the mind of life: Its choice is the work of elemental strengths That know not their own birth and end and cause And glimpse not the immense intent they serve. In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull, Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things, The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways And feels the push but not the hands that drive. For none can see the masked ironic troupe To whom our figure-selves are marionettes, Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp, Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.
Sri Aurobindo
Everybody knows basically what is right and what is wrong. Everybody knows better than to hate others. In fact, most people teach against it, and yet we still see it on the daily. But why do you think that is? It is because the problem was never really humans not loving humans enough; the problem was humans not loving righteousness enough. We must empty our own love for the world so that it can be replaced by the love of Christ; only then will we begin to love people as Christ loves people, as He always intended.
Criss Jami
There is an underlying unity in all things
Arthur Schopenhauer
To be "great" is an ego goal; to be real is existential.
Osho
The body should be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting.
Rousseau Jean-Jacques 1712-1778
Please always see the bright side of everything.
P.R. Sarkar (Shrii Shrii A’nandamu’rti)
When spiritual seeking becomes too complicated, its exercies too elaborated, its doctrines too esoteric, it becomes also too artificial and the resulting achievements too fabricated. It is the beginners and intermediates who carry this heavy and unnecessary burden, who involve themselves to the point of becoming neurotics.
Paul Brunton
Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.
Paul Brunton
The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
Paul Brunton
In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.
Rudolf Steiner
God is our final say in who and what's negative and who and what's positive in our lives. It is best not to have this so over-simplified as the illusioned superstitionists have it; an infinite being's tests may not always be so flowery, and the things we may see as positive are in many cases simply desires of our sinful nature. We are to protect our spirit without falling into the narcissistic mistake of trying to protect our selfish emotions, which the latter, in turn, is more than unlikely to bring peace and happiness. But rather guilt and emptiness. When one walks around constantly, in his mind, attempting to separate positive versus negative people, he is already controlled by something even worse than those he calls the 'negative people', and that is before he spots it soon enough to avoid it as he hypocritically tries to avoid them.
Criss Jami
All earthly desires are but streams, but God is the ocean.
Jonathan Edwards
Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,Without looking for the traces I may have left;A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home;Hearing this, I tilt my head to seeWho has told me to turn back;But do not ask me where I am going,As I travel in this limitless world,Where every step I take is my home.
Dōgen
If a man crosses a riverand an empty boat collides with his own skiff,Even though he be bad tempered manHe will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat,He will shout at him to steer clear.If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, and yet again, and begin cursing.And all because someone is in the boat.Yet if the boat were empty,He would not be shouting, and not angry.If you can empty your own boatCrossing the river of the world,No one will oppose you, No one will seek to harm you
Zhuangzi
The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
Sam Keen
The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev