Quotes by Philosophers - Page 277

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
G.K. Chesterton
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
Martha C. Nussbaum
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
Simone de Beauvoir
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.
Aldous Huxley
Thirty spokesShare one hub.Make the nothing therein appropriate, and you will have the use of the cart.
Lao Tzu
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
A woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.
Seneca
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
John Ruskin
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
Umberto Eco
A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.
Jean Vanier
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
Albert Camus
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain de Botton
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.
Blaise Pascal
A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
Baltasar Gracián
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
Marquis de Sade
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
John Ruskin
That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty.
Marcus Aurelius
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Søren Kierkegaard
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
Muriel Barbery
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without expression is boring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.
Thomas More
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus
Beauty awakens the soul to act.
Dante Alighieri
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves.
Krishnamurti
When you make choices, please remember: what is good for you but not good for others won’t be good for you either, eventually; what’s good for you and others but not good for the Earth won’t be good for you or others either, eventually; what’s good for you, others, and the Earth will be good for all.
Ilchi Lee
Our world desperately needs change. We all know this. The scope of the change ranges from our lifestyles to the direction of our civilization. When we acknowledge our greatness and start living it, when we open our hearts to the natural kindness and the caring for all beings that resides within us, all these necessary transformations can begin.
Ilchi Lee
When you want something and you don’t have it, it may be a cause of stress to you. However, if we reflect on how we came to have things that were not there originally, we can be excited, delighted, and grateful that we want something even before we have it. Seen from this perspective, wanting something—or more specifically, being able to want something while it is not there yet—is already a gift in itself. !is is why we offer gratitude.
Ilchi Lee
Even though consciousness doesn’t seem to be confined to the human brain within the skull, we do experience consciousness through our brain. The transformation of consciousness to attention is facilitated by your brain. Driving thoughts into action is also processed by your brain. Your brain is the seat of the creative observer inside you.
Ilchi Lee
Awareness in its pure state is nonlocal; there’s no focal point in it. It is unbounded. Awareness, when managed and directed, becomes attention. By turning into attention, awareness becomes localized, and attains a focal point. Because of this feature, attention has the power to direct energy.
Ilchi Lee
Where do we begin this process of reevaluation of values? It makes sense to begin with our mind, which is the tool we use to evaluate. Once we make sure it is functioning as it should, we can feel confident in using it to think about our beliefs and priorities.
Ilchi Lee
Conscience is the true power. It resides within us. The intention to be absolutely truthful and the willingness to put the benefit of all before personal benefit hold the power to change the world. !is intention and willingness is of course ethical choice, but it is also the most natural, reasonable, and intelligent choice when we realize what we really are. If people begin to use the full power of conscience in all the choices they make in their everyday life, from presidential elections to purchasing things in the grocery store, the world will change.
Ilchi Lee
Basically it is your choice. No matter what spiritual path you have taken, no matter what experiences you have had, choice is still choice. Spiritual development doesn’t happen automatically. It is choosing the eye of Tao that sees both the whole view of things from a distance and the core of reality from deep inside.
Ilchi Lee
In order to recognize the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the Truth; and to explain the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the recognition. This is why a wordsmithed Truth is nothing but a shadow of the shadow of the Truth. If Buddha had yawned instead of holding up a fower, would that gesture have been any less representative of the Truth?
Ilchi Lee
If we don’t see real changes in the world, it simply means we are not serious enough about creating those changes. We cannot a!ord to entertain superficial changes any more. The changes we need should be deep, real, and thorough.
Ilchi Lee
All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.
Plato
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
Susan Sontag
You aren't supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That's a very dangerous idea, and therefore it's been wiped out of history.
Noam Chomsky
For no man is found so prudent as to know how to adapt himself to these changes, both because he cannot deviate from the course to which nature inclines him, and because, having always prospered while adhering to one path, he cannot be persuaded that it would be well for him to forsake it. And so when occasion requires the cautious man to act impetuously, he cannot do so and is undone: whereas had he changed his nature with time and circumstances, his fortune would have been unchanged.
Niccolò Machiavelli
But though hast come and all will surely change.
Sri Aurobindo
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.
Albert Camus
There is this common notion that young conservatives are the few, that most people had liberal worldviews when they were young. If this is true, then it is with great irony that a number of old liberals must never had progressed into conservatives as they grew older.
Criss Jami
I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.
Criss Jami
Christ died not so that you could freely go on sinning, and therefore, continue dying; He died rather so that you could freely grow in obedience, and therefore, start living.
Criss Jami
The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Almost any established decision procedure is better than a resort to force; for when force is used, people get hurt and the desire for retaliation is likely to lead to more violence. Moreover, most decision procedures produce results at least as beneficial and just as a resort to force.
Peter Singer
For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.
Albert Camus
Since we aim for a healthy life for all, we should teach young girls that their worth can't be validated by dating older rich men, because that is risky for their health. Until we change certain perceptions in society, we will keep fighting the same battles.
Gift Gugu Mona
Every change is a menace to stability.
Aldous Huxley
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
Iris Murdoch
The beauty of being alive is that each day you are given another chance to correct what you did wrong and improve on what you can do right.
Gift Gugu Mona
Poverty should first be addressed in the mind because even if you give millions to a poor person, until there's a change of mindset, they will still remain the same.
Gift Gugu Mona
Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killingthe object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all fromthe wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it doesdestruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche