Quotes by Philosophers - Page 336

Right now I may not have it all, but I know my future is bright because as long as I live there is hope for my situation.
Gift Gugu Mona
Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Never declare Fate your enemy; she does not take lightly declarations of war. Declare your friendship to her instead, and smile in hope of better days.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Believe in the hope of your Life Illusion because this is the only real thing that you posses!
Sorin Cerin
The power of hope! Even a lack of ambition can, for a time, pay off as a necessary facet, as long as hope outweighs it.
Criss Jami
Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde
Dante Alighieri
If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through Christ, the sting of death is but a gentle pinch to the soul; and the mourn is light. Perhaps, someday, in that glorious place, free of sin, we shall meet again.
Criss Jami
For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.
Criss Jami
We hope that we will live only because we must be with God, as alive as He is.
Sorin Cerin
Don’t hope you will receive help from the words of life because they all bring you to death.
Sorin Cerin
Man must use what he has, not hope for what is not.
G.I. Gurdjieff
A King and Queen cannot support a crown with eyes looking down. Their universe expands as far as you can see.
T.F. Hodge
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Adam Smith
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Henri Bergson
We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
Martin Buber
Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.
Augustine of Hippo
You do not get what you wish for, unless it be known to the source of your desire.
T.F. Hodge
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is ignorance that is at times incomprehensible to the wise; for instance, he may not see 'the positive person' or 'the negative person' in such a black and white way as many people do. A wise man may not understand it because, as a catalyst of wisdom, but not always wise in his own eyes, even he can learn from and give back to fools. To think that an individual has absolutely nothing to offer to the table is counter-intuitively what the wise man considers to be 'the ignorance of hopelessness'.
Criss Jami
A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is a humble broken-hearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behaviour.
Jonathan Edwards
With no positivity, there is no hope; with no negativity, there is no improvement.
Criss Jami
The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.
Bertrand Russell
It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
Alain de Botton
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
So dry your tears. Fortune has not yet turned her hatred against all your blessings. The storm has not yet broken upon you with too much violence. Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.
Boethius
I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.
Criss Jami
In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.
Cornel West
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Richard M. Rorty
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
Albert Camus
We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
Albert Camus
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.
Peter Kreeft
There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.
Friedrich Schiller
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
Allen Ginsberg
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Albert Camus
In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.
Marsilio Ficino
Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
Albert Camus
Write it on your heartthat every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the daywho allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish every day and be done with it.You have done what you could.Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;begin it well and serenely, with too high a spiritto be cumbered with your old nonsense.This new day is too dear,with its hopes and invitations,to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
Albert Camus
Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.
Denis de Rougemont
Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.
Criss Jami
Ultimate prosperity is one's value within. It takes a man of depth, morality, and charm to be envied yet without a sign of wealth or romance. A passion to prove such inner worth is his permission to achieve whatever he desires.
Criss Jami
The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.
Voltaire
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion.
Edward Carpenter
Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.
Ayn Rand
The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
G.K. Chesterton
I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever.
Ayn Rand