Quotes by Philosophers - Page 3

Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
G.K. Chesterton
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Mircea Eliade
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
Aldous Huxley
A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dear Hunger Games :Screw you for helping cowards pretend you have to be great with a bow to fight evil.You don't need to be drafted into a monkey-infested jungle to fight evil.You don't need your father's light sabre, or to be bitten by a radioactive spider.You don't need to be stalked by a creepy ancient vampire who is basically a pedophile if you're younger than a redwood.Screw you mainstream media for making it look like moral courage requires hair gel, thousands of sit ups and millions of dollars of fake ass CGI.Moral courage is the gritty, scary and mostly anonymous process of challenging friends, co-workers and family on issues like spanking, taxation, debt, circumcision and war.Moral courage is standing up to bullies when the audience is not cheering, but jeering. It is helping broken people out of abusive relationships, and promoting the inner peace of self knowledge in a shallow and empty pseudo-culture.Moral courage does not ask for - or receive - permission or the praise of the masses. If the masses praise you, it is because you are helping distract them from their own moral cowardice and conformity. Those who provoke discomfort create change - no one else.So forget your politics and vampires and magic wands and photon torpedoes. Forget passively waiting for the world to provoke and corner you into being virtuous. It never will.Stop watching fictional courage and go live some; it is harder and better than anything you will ever see on a screen.Let's make the world change the classification of courage from 'fantasy' to 'documentary.'You know there are people in your life who are doing wrong. Go talk to them, and encourage them to pursue philosophy, self-knowledge and virtue.Be your own hero; you are the One that your world has been waiting for.
Stefan Molyneux
What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.
Peter Sloterdijk
My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.
Voltaire
I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. — A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything.
Thomas Paine
Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.
Georges Bataille
A diamond is just another stone to one who is ignorant of its value.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
Aldous Huxley
To be called insane: challenge convention. To be called possessed: challenge religion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.
Blaise Pascal
Give dry bread to a rich kid and he will throw it into the dustbin, give it to the poor kid and he will remember your name for the rest of his days
Bangambiki Habyarimana
St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.
Lev Shestov
...those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They are blind and would like everyone to be the same, they are mistaken, and would like everyone else to be mistaken; but if you could see into the depths of their hearts you would find only sorrow and repentance; all these apostles of crime are only evil and desperate people; you would not find a sincere person among them who would not admit, if he were truthful, that their poisonous words or dangerous writings had not been guided only by their passions. And what man in fact can say in cold blood that the bases of morality can be shaken without risk? What being would dare maintain that doing good and desiring good are not essentially the aim of mankind? And how can a man who will do only evil expect to be happy in a society whose strongest concern is the perpetual increase of good? But will not this apologist of crime not shudder himself when he had uprooted from all hearts the only thing which could lead to his conversion? What will stop his servants ruining him, if they have ceased to be virtuous?
Marquis de Sade
Those who wish their virtue to be advertised are not striving for virtue but for renown. Are you not willing to be just without being renowned? Nay, indeed you must often be just and be at the same time disgraced. And then, if you are wise, let ill repute, well won, be a delight. Farewell.
Seneca
It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
Ayn Rand
Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Trouble is the place where you find yourself when your judgment malfunction
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.
Jeremy Bentham
Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Blaise Pascal
Only dogs know and respect their masters. This is a rare characteristic of men who secretly envy their masters and wish their downfall.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
G.K. Chesterton
Being rich is an untalented artist’s consolation prize.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The good will is all — and all the talents are ways to fulfill it.
Abraham Isaac Kook
Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
Ayn Rand
Anyone who has ever achieved anything has been a steward of his potential.
Chris Matakas
When somebody comes with a conclusion, then he looks through that conclusion and chooses only things which support his position.Logic is a prostitute.It can help anybody - for or against, it has no problem.
Osho
The legalization of marijuana is not a dangerous experiment – the prohibition is the experiment, and it has failed dramatically, with millions of victims all around the world.
Sebastian Marincolo
There has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal.
Sebastian Marincolo
Apply expectations appropriately. Do not assume [all] adults are as grown up and mature as they should be, or appear to be.
T.F. Hodge
We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The eye of judgment sees at a distance what it refuses to see in it's own reflection.
T.F. Hodge
Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.
Gaston Bachelard
We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.
José Ortega y Gasset
But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self—just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling.
Aldous Huxley
Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A loud mind is greater than a loud mouth.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man’s bank balance is the new penis size.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If there are any ifs to salvation then no one is saved by grace. Everyone saves himself who can meet the requirements
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I have the soul of a white man, the soul of a black man, the soul of an Asian man; the soul of every man.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don’t have to pay the sun to rise, the moon to shine, and the stars to glow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Not all slaves are poor, and not all free men are rich.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Sages shine so they can see the world, not so the world can see them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't wound someone's eye trying to remove the twig from it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A storm is never quiet because it is always calling out to the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When the blind lead the blind the world is full of casualties.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rainbow is a storm's masterpiece.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A spoon does not know whether it enters a rich or poor man's mouth.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The brain's transmutation begins when consciousness understands that it made everything up – morality, good and bad, redemption and the truth. With this understanding, it realizes that now it can start anew.
Shai Tubali
What is it that makes you cry? It is only your attachments. What is it that you miss when it is lost? It is the object of your attachment. Ponder over this. Find out what it is that grips your very life, without which you feel miserable and destitute; that is the center of your attachment. Here is what you should do: make an effort to find out what things it would hurt you to lose. Then, before they are lost, open your hands little by little, relax your grip on them. This is the method for conquering attachment. There is bound to be pain, but you must bear it; this is your penance. It is not necessary to renounce anything. It is not that you should leave your wife and run away to the Himalayas. Remain there, where you are, but gradually stop depending on her. There is no need to cause any pain; your wife need not even know it. There is no need to tell her.Seek out the attachments. Try gradually to live without the things that you now think you cannot live without. Create such a state within yourself that if and when these things are lost, there is not the slightest tremor within you. Then you will have attained victory over these attachments. This can be possible. It has been possible. And if it has happened to even one, it can happen to all.
Osho
Columbus gave Europe a New World; [Alexander von] Humboldt made it known in its physical, material, intellectual, and moral aspects.
José Cipriano de la Luz y Caballero
Do not be ashamed of help.
Marcus Aurelius
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Jean-Paul Sartre