Quotes by Philosophers - Page 302

Trust unites, fear divides, mercy heals, and love conquers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The only weapon you are allowed to kill anyone with is kindness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An evil woman sends her husband away and wails her evil fate
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Love in the rain is better than hate in the sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The end of love looks like the beginning of war
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The middle class were invented to give the poor hope; the poor, to make the rich feel special; the rich, to humble the middle class.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Like alcohol and poverty, a heartbreak has the power to make a man do something he wouldn’t normally do and to make a woman do someone she wouldn’t normally do.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To evade arrogance, remind yourself (from time to time) that your talent or success could have been better. To be thankful, remind yourself (every now and then) that your illness or failure could have been worse.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them.
Adam Smith
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations
Adam Smith
If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.
Noam Chomsky
...man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...
Ayn Rand
Record what you can, pursue your passions, connect with the world, fight the good fight, defy evil, shine incandescently as best you can. And it doesn't matter what field it's in but, it does matter that we leave something that accumulates over time.
Stefan Molyneux
I do not much trust the man who cares solely to inspire - he does not really inspire me - only the man who cares mostly to tell the truth, whatever that may do. For when the man who cares to tell the truth happens to inspire, I, in addition, find it easier to believe that he in fact does his homework on how and when one should truly inspire.
Criss Jami
He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force...
Robert M. Pirsig
We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Break your shackles and reach out to your freedom. Break to pieces whatever indoctrination and programming that holds you hostage. The world is yours. Get possession of it.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When you look down on yourself, you set an example on how others should treat you.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Did you know you could destroy dragons? Dragons are not actually real, they just roar to scare you away from your goals. In fact they are afraid of determined heroes, they take flight at their approach
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Even if everybody says it’s impossible, with determination, there is always something you can do. The last thing is to give up without trying.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Magic always happens when you direct your inner powers to the object you want to change.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Habits are infinitely more beneficial to the aspiring student than motivation. Motivation may get you started, but habits keep you going.
Chris Matakas
Just know that the achievement of anything grand takes consistent effort year after year. Motivation can uphold you intermittently, but it has too few calories to sustain a life.
Chris Matakas
Systems and processes will always surpass motivation.
Chris Matakas
It is better to fail at perfection than it is to succeed at mediocrity.
Eric Robert Morse
If size really mattered, the whale, not the shark, would rule the waters.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.
Luce Irigaray
Did I love what I was doing, or did I love myself in doing it?
C. Terry Warner
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
Eric Hoffer
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!
Marshall McLuhan
What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born.
Longinus
It is reasonable to reason with God because when you only rely on human reasoning, you will be diverted from your purpose.
Gift Gugu Mona
When people reject you, don't be discouraged, because you can still fulfill your God given purpose without them. Remember that your destiny is not tied to any human being, but designed specially for you, by your Creator.
Gift Gugu Mona
You will have to defy the odds, for you to be extraordinary.
Gift Gugu Mona
You will have to defy the odds, for you to become extraordinary.
Gift Gugu Mona
I will not cease to walk in the direction towards my purpose, even if it means constantly walking on a bumpy road.
Gift Gugu Mona
No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is worthwhile when you walk on a path aligned to your purpose.
Gift Gugu Mona
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.
William H. Gass
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Emil M. Cioran
Man was created to glorify God. Now, that may encompass other things which God has planned for each man, but essentially, man was created to glorify God.
Criss Jami
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Don't put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.
Epictetus
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.
Ayn Rand
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.
Johann Gottfried Herder
Law without reason is criminal.
Criss Jami
Unlike wealth, there is an infinite value in legacy.
Criss Jami
Women show men beauty in things beyond their ambitions. Women tell men to stop and smell the roses.
Criss Jami
No! I don't want to speak of that! But I'm going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for. There will be days when you'll stand in the corner of a hall and listen to a creature on a platform talking about buildings, about the work you love, and the things he'll say will make you wait for somebody to rise and crack him open between two thumbnails; and then you'll hear people applauding him, and you'll want to scream, because you won't know whether they're real or you are, whether you're in a room full of gored skulls, or whether someone has just emptied your own head, and you'll say nothing, because the sounds you could make - they're not a language in that room any longer; but you'd want to speak, you won't anyway, because you'll be brushed aside, you who have nothing to tell them about buildings! Is that what you want?
Ayn Rand
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emil M. Cioran
. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.
Jeremy Bentham
To ask, 'How do you do it?' is already starting off on the wrong foot. When reaching for the stars, there does not have to be a 'how' if there is a big enough 'why'.
Criss Jami
The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.
Criss Jami
to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay - that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live - that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road - that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up - that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
Ayn Rand
Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it!
Ayn Rand
Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
Criss Jami