Quotes by Philosophers - Page 3

Moving rocks today strengthens you for moving mountains tomorrow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Today's tears water tomorrow's gardens.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You cannot stop the ocean's current, but you can swim.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As water downs ships but upholds leaves,and as fires burn cities but refines gold,so do life's troubles propel the meek to greatnessand the proud to ruin.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When bad things happen to you, become wiser, not bitter.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The desert is harsh, but persevering flowers flourish.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The loveliest flowers sometimes grow in the ugliest places.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your back may be pushed against the wall, but your brain is not.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Caged birds still sing beautiful symphonies.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Seeds pour out oil when pressed.Grapes pour out wine when squeezed.Herbs pour out medicine when pounded.Flowers pour out perfume when crushed.The gifted pour out excellence when tested.
Matshona Dhliwayo
He who runs from a challenge runs from an opportunity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most beautiful rainbows are sometimes formed in the ugliest storms.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When darkness comes,stars shine.When storms come,plants flourish.When adversity comes,champions triumph.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A flower does not lose its beauty because it grew on concrete.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Flowers still have to stretch to bloom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.
Ayn Rand
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.
Plato
To amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously.
Aristotle
You always play it open, don’t you?” he asked.“I’ve never noticed you doing otherwise.”“I thought I was the only one who could afford to.
Ayn Rand
First sons and daughters seduced to play and party 'til it was too late to realize they were being lead to the slaughter. They discounted the law of moderation.
T.F. Hodge
That one has to be playing in order to be playing a game seems equally implausible. When professional athletes are performing in assigned games for wages, although they are certainly playing games, we are not at all inclined to conclude from that fact that they are without qualification playing. For we think of professional athletes as working when they play their games and as playing when they go home from work to romp with their children.
Bernard Suits
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
James P. Carse
It is a happy talent to know how to play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
Stanisław Lem
We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.
Mario Bunge
Information is information, not matter or energy.
Norbert Wiener
The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information.
Umberto Eco
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Daniel C. Dennett
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Remember, truth cannot be conquered. One has to surrender to truth, one has to be conquered by truth.
Osho
When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.
Søren Kierkegaard
The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.
Ayn Rand
Something wonderful has happened to me. I was carried up into the seventh heaven. There all the gods sat assembled. By special grace I was granted the favor of a wish. "Will you," said Mercury, "have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing." For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: "Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side." Not one of the gods said a word, on the contrary, they all began to laugh. Hence, I concluded that my request was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with great taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to answer gravely: "It is granted thee".
Søren Kierkegaard
She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.
Muriel Barbery
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller
As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body but can never be so in mind.
Cicero
What though youth gave love and roses Age still leaves us friends and wine.
Thomas More
The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
In early youth as we contemplate our coming life we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The remedy for wrongs is to forget them.
Syrus
Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
Elbert Hubbard
Whom the gods love die young no matter how long they live.
Elbert Hubbard
A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
Thomas Paine
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would be a reader read if a writer write.
Epictetus
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Marshall McLuhan
Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
William James
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Ralph Waldo Emerson