Quotes by Philosophers - Page 315

Life has a meaning but do not set out to find out. Just live it out.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived.
Howard Thurman
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin
Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end
Immanuel Kant
The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
Aristotle
Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
Thomas Hobbes
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Adventure is worthwhile.
Aristotle
Sirs, if you are listening and are not acting, it is like a man who is always tilling but never sowing. It is better not to listen to a truth than to listen without acting, for then it becomes a poison.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If your heart is a volcano,how shall you expect flower to bloom?
Gibran Khalil Gibran
A flower’s beauty is birthed in a seed’s ugly struggles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
José Ortega y Gasset
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Thomas Carlyle
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Thomas Carlyle
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle
For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Johann Gottfried Herder
I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
Niccolò Machiavelli
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
Niccolò Machiavelli
But confining myself more to the particular, I say that a prince may be seen happy to-day and ruined to-morrow without having shown any change of disposition or character. This, I believe, arises firstly from causes that have already been discussed at length, namely, that the prince who relies entirely upon fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful. Because men are seen, in affairs that lead to the end which every man has before him, namely, glory and riches, to get there by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force, another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method. One can also see of two cautious men the one attain his end, the other fail; and similarly, two men by different observances are equally successful, the one being cautious, the other impetuous; all this arises from nothing else than whether or not they conform in their methods to the spirit of the times. This follows from what I have said, that two men working differently bring about the same effect, and of two working similarly, one attains his object and the other does not.
Niccolò Machiavelli
You have to lift a person up before you can really put them in their place.
Criss Jami
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now.
Epictetus
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.
Bruce Lee
First say to yourself what you would beand then do what you have to do.
Epictetus
Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
Confucius
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Albert Camus
If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.
Simone de Beauvoir
Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.
Simone de Beauvoir
Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.
Erich Fromm
His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room.
Rabindranath Tagore
Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.
Alain de Botton
we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
Alain de Botton
There are some people who may be good yet toxic for you, so be careful of who you surround yourself with.
Gift Gugu Mona
To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
Simone Weil
A great relationship ... breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.
Martin Buber
Everyone knows the experience of encountering other persons only under the aspect of how they intersect with our projects, and of noticing them only insofar as we have to notice them in order to interact with them as we pursue our goals. But from time to time we realize more keenly that the other with whom we are dealing is a person, and then we feel the irreverence and the arrogance of our attitude. We become aware of a certain violence with which we have been treating other persons; we realize that we have to draw back and grant them a space in which to be themselves as persons, and that we have to cease seeing them exclusively in relation to our projects.
John F. Crosby
The answer to violence is the improvement of childhood.
Stefan Molyneux
Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are born firstly with the instinct to protect themselves. But few grow to really love themselves, and even fewer learn to love their neighbor as themselves.
Criss Jami
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Henry David Thoreau
We men are fascinated by the things we don't really understand. It gives us something to think and talk about: like females, they drive us nuts.
Criss Jami
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
12% of people marry because they are completely in love. 88% of people marry just so they are then liable for only half of their rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.
Peter Kreeft
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Alain de Botton
Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode--a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.
Christos Yannaras
..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.
Cornel West
The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.
Christos Yannaras
Women rescue men just as much as, if not more than, men rescue women.
Criss Jami
There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
Alain de Botton