Quotes by Philosophers - Page 270

No ideology can help to create a new worldor a new mind or a new human being --because ideological orientation itselfis the root cause of all the conflicts and all the miseries.Thought creates boundaries, thought creates divisions and thought creates prejudices; thought itself cannot bridge them. That's why all ideologies fail.Now man must learn to live without ideologiesreligious, political or otherwise. When the mind is not tethered to any ideology, it is free to move to new understandings. And in that freedom flowers all that is good and all that is beautiful.
Osho
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Alan W. Watts
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
do it or don't do it but get on with it...
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.
Criss Jami
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
Rabindranath Tagore
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.
Augustine of Hippo
You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
Swami Vivekananda
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!
John Ruskin
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Henry David Thoreau
In unremarkable texts we soon trip on phrases that penetrate into us, as if a sword has thrust up to its hilt inside us.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
Mortimer J. Adler
Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.
Mortimer J. Adler
Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.
Maurice Blanchot
You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.
Mortimer J. Adler
The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.
Mortimer J. Adler
Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.
Mortimer J. Adler
The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.
Mortimer J. Adler
I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple minds who can't take in the strong content they provide
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I have found that the morning is far more accessible when a good book awaits you.
Chris Matakas
There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.
Régis Debray
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.----Alcuni libri devono essere gustati, altri masticati e digeriti, vale a dire che alcuni libri vanno letti solo in parte, altri senza curiosità, e altri per intero, con diligenza ed attenzione. Alcuni libri possono essere letti da altri e se ne possono fare degli estratti, ma ciò riguarderebbe solo argomenti di scarsa importanza o di libri secondari perché altrimenti i libri sintetizzati sono come l’acqua distillata, evanescente. La lettura completa la formazione di un uomo; il parlare lo fa abile, e la scrittura lo trasforma in un uomo preciso. E, pertanto, se un uomo scrive poco, deve avere una grande memoria, se parla poco ha bisogno di uno spirito arguto; se legge poco deve avere bisogno di molta astuzia in modo da far sembrare di sapere quello che non sa. Le storie fanno gli uomini saggi; i poeti arguti; la matematica sottile; la filosofia naturale profondi; la logica e la retorica abili nella discussione.
Bacon Francis 1561-1626 Francis
But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
Alain de Botton
Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up.
Søren Kierkegaard
[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture…
Arthur Schopenhauer
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
And remember also that when we seek to learn from nature directly, our ultimate aim is to understand the world in which we live. We neither agree nor disagree with nature as we often do in the case of books.
Adler Mortimer
This consists in not taking a book into one’s hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time — such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind
Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
Louis Althusser
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
Michel de Certeau
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.
Iris Murdoch
How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.
Pascal Mercier
Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
Henry David Thoreau
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain de Botton
When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
Blaise Pascal
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
Aldous Huxley
With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.
Aldous Huxley
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.
Ayn Rand
Books are absent teachers.
Mortimer J. Adler
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
Montesquieu
If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.
Mortimer J. Adler
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
Umberto Eco
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.
Voltaire