Quotes by Philosophers - Page 335

… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.
Hermann Broch
Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man.
Epicurus
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
Albert Camus
The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.
Bertrand Russell
Look at your own povertywelcome itcherish itdon't be afraidshare your deathbecause thus you will share your love and your life
Jean Vanier
Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.
Albert Camus
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
Allen Ginsberg
That which has died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of thyself. And these too change, and they murmur not".
Marcus Aurelius
So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
Muriel Barbery
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
Albert Camus
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
Joseph de Maistre
Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.
Giacomo Leopardi
Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.
Henry David Thoreau
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Jean-Yves Leloup
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Søren Kierkegaard
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Simone de Beauvoir
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Albert Camus
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
Epicurus
Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark
Thomas Hobbes
The final reward of the dead - to die no more
Friedrich Nietzsche
Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
Marcus Aurelius
Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
Thomas Paine
The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
Jostein Gaarder
A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.
G.K. Chesterton
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. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
Alan W. Watts
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.
Umberto Eco
What mancan you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he isdying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.
Seneca
We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living
Confucius
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.
Pythagoras
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
Erich Fromm
The many men, so beautiful!And they all dead did lie:And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLived on; and so did I.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.
Osho
I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.
Plato
Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.
Henry David Thoreau
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Immanuel Kant
Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Socrates
Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other - and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
Jostein Gaarder
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
G.K. Chesterton
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
Socrates
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There is a certain delightful sort of hope which the introvert can receive only by having company over...the hope that they will leave soon.
Criss Jami
It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
G.K. Chesterton
We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.
Albert Camus
As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.
Paulo Freire
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less
G.K. Chesterton
Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.
Noam Chomsky
There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
There is do much sttuborn hope in a human heart.
Albert Camus
Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be
A.C. Grayling
I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-lifedestroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politicsof despair. This world deserves better.
Alexis Shotwell
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
Lao Tzu
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything
Thomas Carlyle