Quotes by Philosophers - Page 319

Have nuts and be nuts.
Criss Jami
Who dare tries is a success, and shall master the art of conquering dreams.
T.F. Hodge
If you want to make a stand, help others make a stand, and if you want to reach your goal, help others reach their goal. Consider yourself and treat others accordingly: this is the method of Humanity.
Confucius
Gloating is a superficial glowing, floating is an idle flowing, and bloatedness is the paralysis of blowing up; because silent movement results in loud victories.
Criss Jami
Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
Alain de Botton
If a craftsman wants to do good work, he must first sharpen his tools.
Confucius
You only have to doze a moment, and all is lost. For ruin and salvation both have their source inside you.
Epictetus
You know you made it, when your friends tell their friends that you are their friend.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One may not always know his purpose until his only option is to monopolize in what he truly excels at. He grows weary of hearing the answer 'no' time and time again, so he turns to and cultivates, monopolizes in his one talent which others cannot possibly subdue. Then, beyond the crowds of criticism and rejection, the right people recognize his talent - among them he finds his stage.
Criss Jami
Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.
Criss Jami
The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations.
Criss Jami
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
José Ortega y Gasset
Don’t grieve when people fail to recognize your ability. Grieve for your lack of ability instead.
Confucius
I'd rather strive for the kind of interview where instead of me asking to introduce myself to society, society asks me to introduce myself to society.
Criss Jami
There's sometimes a tugging feeling you get to push further when you aren't being challenged enough or when things get too comfortable.
Criss Jami
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
Alain de Botton
Credentials are like potential energy, the compliments of a name on paper, in documents, word of mouth, but faith is like kinetic energy, the motion and the force that which is witnessed. Hence in the end it is the faith rather than the credentials that really takes you places.
Criss Jami
Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.
Albert Camus
The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit (advantage) nor harm, but from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself.
Epictetus
It's neither judgment nor judgment according to the status quo that we have a problem with, but rather judgment according to God's Word that we have a problem with. We sharply dress ourselves, go out into the world, shape ourselves, our personalities according to the world's standards and preferences, allow ourselves to be made dull by the world and its desires in order to appear successful and happy and attractive in the eyes of the world. We love the world's judgment but we hate God's judgment. Absurdly enough, the one that really matters, the one out of the purest of loves rather than a mere contract in hopes of mutual gain, is the one which we so adamantly try to shut ourselves off from.
Criss Jami
It is not enough to be busy so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
Albert Camus
Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction
Friedrich Nietzsche
In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.
Paulo Freire
When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
Confucius
Soar with wit. Conquer with dignity. Handle with care.
Criss Jami
Constantly stopping to explain oneself may expand into a frustrating burden for the rare individual, so ceasing to do so is like finally dropping the weights and sprinting towards his goals. Those who insincerely misunderstand, who intentionally distort the motives of a pure-intentioned individual, then, no longer have the opportunity to block his path; instead, they are the ones left to stand on the sidelines shouting frustratedly in the wind of his trail.
Criss Jami
As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.
Criss Jami
I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.
Jean Vanier
The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.
Elbert Hubbard
When emerging from humble beginnings, those around you tend to underestimate your authenticity because they knew you before you were 'somebody'.
Criss Jami
Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.
Niccolò Machiavelli
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.
Voltaire
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never was anything great achieved without danger.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Francis Bacon
The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.
Criss Jami
Believing that there is a conflict between rationality and spirituality is like believing that there is a conflict between knowledge and inspiration.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Because you're always learning, the chief lesson remains: you still know nothing.
Criss Jami
How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information.
Criss Jami
The more you know, the less you talk. The less you talk, the more you know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Knowing more than someone does not necessarily mean that you know every single thing they know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.
Criss Jami
Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.
Friedrich A. Hayek
It is the right of the positive scientist, the logician, the mathematician, and the physicist, to remain within his scientific tradition and to abstain from concerning himself with its origin and institution. It is the duty of the philosopher to raise precisely that question in order to clarify and account for the very sense of modern science.
Aron Gurwitsch
Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don't blow the world up with the truth; you shock it into motion.
Criss Jami
All knowledge meets an end at the question '...Why?
Criss Jami
A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It sometimes requires ignorance and arrogance to know something for sure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.
Stefan Molyneux
In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.
J.W. Dunne
Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
An ignorant man who is regarded as knowledgeable by people who are more ignorant than him is still ignorant.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse.
Criss Jami
We must not allow our pride to be the motivation behind our apologetics; rather, philoverity, the love of truth must be the full and complete motivation. For pride corrupts truth.
Criss Jami
Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone’s observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Francis Bacon