Quotes by Philosophers - Page 296

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.
Albert Camus
In love there are two evils: war and peace.
Horace
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate predjudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.
Thomas Paine
The love of conflict is most evident when opposing forces join sides to defeat the peacemaker.
Criss Jami
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...
Thomas Paine
So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
Voltaire
It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
Albert Camus
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul Sartre
When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In times of war, the law falls s
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Do not distance yourself from the people who need you most today, because tomorrow you will need them the most.
Gift Gugu Mona
Any leadership that is observant and committed to its people, will always find better ways to solve problems.
Gift Gugu Mona
Do not distance yourself from people who need you most today, because tomorrow you will need them the most.
Gift Gugu Mona
The most progressive approach to life is to discuss ideas than people.
Gift Gugu Mona
Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People should avoid hatred at all costs, because not only does it affect the hater’s health; it also prevents them from enjoying the goodness of love.
Gift Gugu Mona
People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.
Hélène Cixous
Don't expect too much from people who don't even have respect for themselves.
Gift Gugu Mona
The reason why people do not have price tags is, because life is priceless.
Gift Gugu Mona
People who know their worth understand the power of their own words.
Gift Gugu Mona
The reason why we need love more than street lights is because love illuminates the world, no matter the time of day. Where there is no love, even with street lights on, the world would still be lost in the darkness of hatred.
Gift Gugu Mona
the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept halfway in order, the public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature. More and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligations within it. This withdrawal from the world need not harm an individual; he may even cultivate great talents to the point of genius and so by a detour be useful to the world again. But with each such retreat an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place; what is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men.
Hannah Arendt
When it comes to judging individuals, I do not like remarks such as 'too good to be true.' They speak as though one is rewarding the nature of evil. Yet, ironically, we still wonder where all the good people have gone.
Criss Jami
The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most ofthe people understand the language of sword with greater power than thelanguage of word.
Kedar Joshi
When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to govern the people,You must place yourself below them.If you want to lead people,You must learn how to follow them.
Lao Tzu
Where words lose their meaning, people lose their lives.
Confucius
A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
The only really interesting thing iswhat happens between two people in a room.
Francis Bacon
Considering the notion that the spiritual battlefield is infinitely greater than the physical, perhaps God is more willing to bless with a sort of divine ecstasy those who see the devil as the enemy rather than those who see other people as the enemies.
Criss Jami
When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.
Ayn Rand
People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.
Jean Vanier
People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I wantto vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
I think that I am too warm to negatively judge individuals, yet I am cold enough to negatively judge humanity.
Criss Jami
Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love may be harder to find in some people, but when they do love you know it must be something marvelous.
Criss Jami
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
Susan Sontag
Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.
Friedrich Nietzsche
So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!
Jean-Paul Sartre
good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws
Plato
A leader is bestWhen people barely know he existsOf a good leader, who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say, “We did this ourselves.
Lao Tzu
Hell is—other people!
Jean-Paul Sartre
When you meet someone, and you find that they are prejudiced against your kind, it might be your chance, not to confirm, but to be the one to finally change their mind.
Criss Jami
Though such authority and respect shouldn't be handed to all and sundry, have in caution's innermost room a confidant, a faithful mirror, whose correction you value when disillusionment is necessary.
Baltasar Gracián
The most reliable friend you have is your shadow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Where a man cannot fitly play his own part; if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.
Francis Bacon
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').
Alexander Nehamas
What is evil neither can nor should be loved; for it is not one’s duty to be a lover of evil or to become like what is bad; and we have said that like is dear to like. Must the friendship, then, be forthwith broken off? Or is this not so in all cases, but only when one’s friends are incurable in their wickedness? If they are capable of being reformed one should rather come to the assistance of their character or their property, inasmuch as this is better and more characteristic of friendship. But a man who breaks off such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing strange; for it was not to a man of this sort that he was a friend; when his friend changed, therefore, and he is unable to save him, he gives him up.
Aristotle
In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.
Bertrand Russell
I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.
Susan Sontag
And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know
Aldous Huxley
Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
Simone Weil
Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.
Socrates
We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
Alain de Botton
How closely flattery resembles friendship! It not only apes friendship, but outdoes it, passing it in the race; with wide-open and indulgent ears it is welcomed and sinks to the depths of the heart, and it is pleasing precisely wherein it does harm.
Seneca
A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves— and who want to go where I want to go.
Friedrich Nietzsche
After this manner conceive that a flatterer differs from a friend: for it often happens to both that they engage in the same employments and the same associations; but the one differs from the other in use, in the end, and in the disposition of the soul: for the friend considers that which appears to him to be good to belong also in common to his friend; and, whether this proves to be painful or pleasant, he partakes equally of it with him; but the flatterer, following his own desires, conducts the association to his own advantage. The friend desires an equality of good, the flatterer his own private good. The one aspires after equal honour in virtue, the other after superiority in pleasure. The one in conversation desires an equal freedom of speech, the other servile submission. The one loves truth in association, the other deception; and the one looks to future emolument, but the other to present delight. The one requires to be reminded of his good actions, the other wishes them to be involved in oblivion. The one takes care of the possessions of his friend, as of things common, the other destroys them, as being the property of another. The company of a friend in prosperity is most opportune, and in calamity is most equal; but a flatterer can never be satiated with prosperity, and in adversity he is never to be seen. Friendship is laudable, flattery detestable; for friendship attends to equality of retribution, but this flattery mutilates: for he who pays servile attention to another through indigence, that his wants may be supplied, so far as he does not receive an equal submission in return, will reprobate the inequality. A friend, when his friendship is concealed, is unhappy; on the contrary, a flatterer is miserable when is flattery is not concealed. Friendship when tried is strengthened, flattery is confuted, by time. Friendship requires not to be corroborated by advantage, but flattery cannot subsist without profit; and if men have any communion with the divinities, the pious man is a friend to divinity, but the superstitious is a flatterer of divinity; and the pious man is blessed, but the superstitious is miserable.
Maximus Tyrius
To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.
Iris Murdoch