Quotes by Philosophers - Page 345

The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.
Dante Alighieri
Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle ofsoftness overcoming hardness.
Lao Tzu
Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
Confucius
I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
Henry David Thoreau
The small wisdom is like water in a glass:clear, transparent, pure.The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:dark, mysterious, impenetrable.
Rabindranath Tagore
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?
Confucius
The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
William James
The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Baltasar Gracián
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Umberto Eco
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
Alan W. Watts
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
Socrates
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.
Confucius
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
Voltaire
The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.
Thomas Paine
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
Bruce Lee
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Aristotle
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Socrates
In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.
Bertrand Russell
It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life—if that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To some believers, being on the pill or using a condom is a nonverbal way of telling God to go to hell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is but one supremacy... and it remains known and unknown to it's human creation... of many hues, shapes and sizes.
T.F. Hodge
The Giver of Life enrages us,He intoxicates us here.No one is at His sideto be famous, to rule on Earth.
Nezahualcóyotl
The Limit of Happiness Is the Presence of GodBut it is something great that Abraham asks, namely that God shall not pass by nor remove to a distance and leave his soul desolate and empty (Gen. 18:3). For the limit of happiness is the presence of God, which completely fills the whole soul with his whole incorporeal and eternal light.
Philo of Alexandria
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will" -- "unfree will" for that matter), and purely imaginary effects ("sin," "salvation," "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings -- for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash -- , "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life"). -- This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on the meaning of "abominable" -- the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (-- the real! --), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for lying his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...
Friedrich Nietzsche
In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.
Albert Camus
To talk about God, except in the context of prayer, is to take His name in vain.One may, indeed, talk to a child about God, but this is on a par with telling him that he was brought to his mother by a stork.
Ferdinand Ebner
The world of an animal is reduced to its perimeter. Human world is reduced to its perimeter, but does the world of God have perimeters? If it does then it is not infinite, but if it doesn’t, it means that this is not a world.
Sorin Cerin
Are we the wreck or the ship of God's Word?
Sorin Cerin
Between world and animal are fewer questions than between man and world. How many such questions are there in God's Word?
Sorin Cerin
Who prays at help in the Illusion of his Life does not understand that his only aid is death
Sorin Cerin
What distances can be explored without God?
Sorin Cerin
There are no names that do not desire fame because we come from God.
Sorin Cerin
I can never feel that the Illusion of Life is a truth as long as any illusion reflects unreality; however, even an untruth is a truth in its turn.
Sorin Cerin
All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God.
Aldous Huxley
Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment "seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that "God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation...Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active.
Josef Pieper
Here we must take account of one of St. Thomas's conceptual distinctions, which at first seems like unnecessary caviling. It is the distinction between "uncreated" and "created" happiness. We have here something which, while not at all obvious, is nevertheless fraught with consequences for our whole feeling about life. Namely, this: what does indeed make us happy is the infinite and uncreated richness of God; but participation in this, happiness itself, is entirely a "creatural" reality governed from within by our humanity; it is not something that descends overwhelmingly upon us from outside. That is, it is not only something that happens to us; we ourselves are intensely active participants in our own happiness. Beatitude - Thomas is saying - cannot possibly be conceived as a merely objective condition of sheer existence. It is not a mere quality, not pure passivity, not simply a feeling. It is something that takes place in the alert core of the mind... Happiness is an act and an activity of the soul.
Josef Pieper
The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world.
Josef Pieper
Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?
Theodor W. Adorno
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
Henry David Thoreau
Faith, in its most correct form, never removes responsibility; it removes fear of responsibility. The results are complete opposites with the greater saying, 'God's will is my delight.
Criss Jami
This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.
Sam Harris
Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, 'Wake up! Love! Pray!
Criss Jami
One of the greatest gifts from God is the eternal perspective. It is a level of fearlessness, a level of understanding where one can experience even emotional harmony with God.
Criss Jami
God's relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.
Criss Jami
Everyone claims to be okay with freedom of religion, but the moment you mention God there is a strange tension that fills the air. If there was a 6th sense, that would be it.
Criss Jami
Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.
Criss Jami
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
William Lane Craig
Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
Dallas Willard
There is a greater Christian faith than one which settles for the temporal happiness, and that is the augmentation of faith. The more faithful you become, the harder the obstacles get; but the harder the obstacles get, the tougher your spine grows; and the tougher your spine grows, the less dependent you are on man's approval. I came to know this about Christianity when valuing faith before comfort.
Criss Jami
The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.
G.K. Chesterton