Quotes by Philosophers - Page 303

It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.
Criss Jami
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
Robert M. Pirsig
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To fear man's judgment more than God's judgment is to fear man more than God.
Criss Jami
On the one hand you had people constantly fighting Hell; on the other, you had people constantly fighting Hell on earth.
Criss Jami
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.
Ayn Rand
Sir Edward Grey echoed this: More than one true thing may be said about the causes of the war, but the statement that comprises most truth is that militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable. Armaments were intended to produce a sense of security in each nation – that was the justification put forward in defence of them. What they really did was to produce fear in everybody.
Jonathan Glover
Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The Christian who loves his Master needs not fear any longer for himself. For it is then completely irrational, as it is written thus: 'Perfect love casts out fear.' However, it is very much rational for one to instead fear for the enemies of God.
Criss Jami
Stalin’s Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria’s behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.
Jonathan Glover
The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Christians sometimes make themselves into elephants afraid of mice. You have the Creator of the universe on your side; not to mention, you've been given eternal life. 'Whom or what shall you fear?' To be afraid of anything other than God himself is like an insult to God.
Criss Jami
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. There is a deep-seated fear, in most people, of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; there is a longing for affection, which is often concealed by roughness, boorishness or a bullying manner in men, and by nagging and scolding in women. Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one.
Bertrand Russell
Wealth seldom fails to breed the fear of poverty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Even those who want to go to heaven would rather kill than be killed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that.
Neel Burton
Avoid fear because it will blind you from seeing God’s purpose about your life and limit your potential.
Gift Gugu Mona
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Michel de Montaigne
f you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.
Seneca
Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all.
Alan W. Watts
Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
Emil M. Cioran
Great leaders do not fear challenges, because challenges don't break leaders but sharpens them.
Gift Gugu Mona
The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
U.G. Krishnamurti
Fear is the will's little baby. It arises with the possibility you will lose what you desire.
Shai Tubali
Do not fear to give yourself a chance that will change you for the better.
Gift Gugu Mona
your soul is sunken in that cowardice that bears down many men, turning their course and resolution by imagined perils, as his own shadow turns the frightened horse.
Dante Alighieri
Fear is always around some desire. You want to become a famous man, the most famous man in the world- then there is fear. What if you cannot make it? Fear comes. You want to become the richest man in the world. What if you don't succeed? You start trembling; fear comes. You want to possess a woman and you are afraid that tomorrow you may not be able to hold on to her, she may go to somebody else.
Osho
You know it is a broken society when people fear each other more than they fear wild animals.
Gift Gugu Mona
You will not find joy out of fear, therefore eliminate every component of fear in your life if joy is what you need.
Gift Gugu Mona
The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton
Reality never comes as a problem. It is only the ideas about reality that comes as a problem.
Osho
And the great question for mankind is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever and old love or fear has lost its hold.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanisław Lem
fear in sooth holds so in check all mortals, becasue thay see many operations go on in earth and heaven, the causes of which they can in no way understand, believing them therefore to be done by power divine. for these reasons when we shall have seen that nothing can be produced from nothing, we shall then more correctly ascertain that which we are seeking, both the elements out of which every thing can be produced and the manner in which every thing can be produced in which all things are done without the hands of the gods.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence.
Noam Chomsky
Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.
Criss Jami
What may intimidate a man is a woman who thinks with her mind before she feels with her heart. Nevertheless what determines the strength in the man is his ability to accept one when he sees one.
Criss Jami
The most judgmental people are often those who complain most about being judged. The ones not complaining will look as though they're the ones doing the judging.
Criss Jami
Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.
Criss Jami
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man is tolerant because he was given the flag of peace, another because he is cowardly and wishes to hide all guilt.
Criss Jami
From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
Niccolò Machiavelli
From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other, but because they are difficult to combine, it is far better to be loved than feared if you cannot be both.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
The thing I fear most is fear.
Michel de Montaigne
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
Iris Murdoch
Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
Georges Bataille
The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.
Edmund Burke
No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.
Criss Jami
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
Ayn Rand