Quotes by Philosophers - Page 351

I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.
Ken Wilber
No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.
Xenophon
Tolerance! The virtue that makes one bite his tongue so that he can tear out his hair.
Criss Jami
Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.
Umberto Eco
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
Alan W. Watts
I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.
Ludwig Feuerbach
We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.
Peter Kreeft
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
Denis Diderot
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
Aldous Huxley
truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.
Martin Heidegger
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
Voltaire
Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.
Bruce Lee
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot – "Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That’s the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.
Daniel C. Dennett
There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
René Descartes
There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.
Criss Jami
The truth brings no man a fortune.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
John Ruskin
There are two paths of which one may choose in the walk of life; one we are born with, and the one we consciously blaze. One is naturally true, while the other is a perceptive illusion. Choose wisely at each fork in the road.
T.F. Hodge
If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Dōgen
Always seek justice, but love only mercy. To love justice and hate mercy is but a doorway to more injustice.
Criss Jami
The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition
Rabindranath Tagore
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.
David Hume
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
Maimonides
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
G.K. Chesterton
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
Confucius
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
Alain de Botton
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
Thomas Paine
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....
Alfred North Whitehead
One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.
Peter Kreeft
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ego lusts for satisfaction. It has a prideful ferocious appetite for its version of "truth". It is the most challenging aspect to conquer; the cause for most spiritual turmoil.
T.F. Hodge
Don’t spoil me with your lies, love me with your truth.
T.F. Hodge
No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
You can't let the truth bring out the worst and let it get the best of you.
Criss Jami
Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!
Galen
They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.
Giordano Bruno
Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.
Baruch Spinoza
Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
Baruch Spinoza
Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.
Criss Jami
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Why do people respect the package rather than the man?
Michel de Montaigne
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
Alan Keightley
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
René Descartes
We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.
Hélène Cixous
Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.
Swami Vivekananda
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]
Edmund Burke
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
Simone Weil
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.
Blaise Pascal
It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
A.C. Grayling
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
John Locke
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
René Descartes