Quotes by Philosophers - Page 348

There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.
Augustine of Hippo
If you understood him, it would not be God.
Augustine of Hippo
Where I will find peace other than in oblivion?
Sorin Cerin
It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.
Voltaire
The humble sinner will sometimes be interpreted as one of the filthiest in the eyes of man yet immersed in the eyes of God, and this is due to the volition of honesty regarding his own corruption.
Criss Jami
If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything.
Peter Kreeft
Never say, "O Lord, I am a miserable sinner." Who will help you? You are the help of the universe. What in this universe can help you? What can prevail over you? You are the God of the universe; where can you seek for help? Never help came from anywhere but from yourself. In your ignorance, every prayer that you made and that was answered, you thought was answered by some Being, but you answered the prayer yourself unknowingly. The help came from yourself, and you fondly imagined that someone was sending help to you. There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm, you have built a cocoon around yourself. Who will save you? Burst your own cocoon and come out as a beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth.
Swami Vivekananda
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.
Francis Bacon
God favors men and women who delight in being made worthy of happiness before the happiness itself.
Criss Jami
Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".
Peter Kreeft
The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.
Criss Jami
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly
Paul Valéry
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
Aldous Huxley
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.
Miguel de Unamuno
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Sam Harris
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Mikhail Bakunin
I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
Iris Murdoch
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
Marquis de Sade
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
Marquis de Sade
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
Sam Harris
Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.
Bertrand Russell
The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
Søren Kierkegaard
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
Swami Vivekananda
We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
Sam Harris
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
Jean-Paul Sartre
God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece.
Albert Camus
I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?
Criss Jami
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Søren Kierkegaard
Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.
Criss Jami
A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.
Criss Jami
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
Arthur Schopenhauer
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
G.K. Chesterton
If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.My shoulder is against yours.you will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.When you really look for me, you will see me instantly —you will find me in the tiniest house of time.Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.
Kabir
Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.
Alan W. Watts
The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.
Sam Harris
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
Bertrand Russell
Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Voltaire
Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.
Criss Jami
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
Robert M. Pirsig
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Epicurus
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Albert Camus
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
Augustine of Hippo
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Søren Kierkegaard
Nanak dukhiya sab sansar.
Nanak
Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth.
Johann Georg Zimmermann
But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.
Francis Bacon
How many truths pass wrecking through the Illusion of Life, but none of them is an absolute truth therefore the real truth!
Sorin Cerin
To say that death opposes life is just the same as you would say you live the absolute truth.
Sorin Cerin
I believed in the faith of faith without acknowledging his quality of being an absolute truth.
Sorin Cerin
What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Now (obviously) a sentence’s truth—even when we hold the sentence’s meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. “Brown is Prime Minister” is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there are countless worlds in which “Brown is Prime Minister” is false: in those worlds, Brown did not succeed Tony Blair, or never went into politics, or never even existed. And in some other worlds, someone else is Prime Minister — David Cameron, P. F. Strawson, me, Madonna, or Daffy Duck. In still others, there is no such office as Prime Minister, or not even a Britain; and so on and so forth. So a given sentence or proposition varies its truth-value from world to world.
William G. Lycan
As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. 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...
Henry David Thoreau
...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.
Friedrich Nietzsche