Quotes by Philosophers - Page 352

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hell is truth seen too late.
Thomas Hobbes
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Albert Schweitzer
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.
P.D. Ouspensky
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
René Descartes
A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.
Criss Jami
But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.
Edmund Burke
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right
Miguel de Unamuno
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
It's not about going around trying to stir up trouble. As long as you're honest and you articulate what you believe to be true, somebody somewhere will become your enemy whether you like it or not.
Criss Jami
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you.
Criss Jami
Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Albert Camus
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
Aldous Huxley
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone de Beauvoir
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Meister Eckhart
You should not honor men more than truth.
Plato
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
Seneca
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
Augustine of Hippo
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
Socrates
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren Kierkegaard
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
Noam Chomsky
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
Aristotle
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes
Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.
Voltaire
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand
If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.
Marcus Aurelius
Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.
Criss Jami
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
Albert Camus
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Søren Kierkegaard
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
Lao Tzu
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Marcus Aurelius
Love truth, but pardon error.
Voltaire
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Ayn Rand
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau
(So), he who displays himself does not shine; he who asserts his own views is not distinguished; he who vaunts himself does not find his merit acknowledged; he who is self-conceited has no superiority allowed to him.
Lao Tzu
God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
William of Conches
You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.
Marcus Aurelius
All things in the world of Nature are not controlled by Fate for the soul has a principle of its own.
Iamblichus
Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.
Neel Burton
I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.
Arthur C. Danto
Reflect that nothing merits admiration except thespirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.
Seneca
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
Martin Heidegger
A philosopher operates with deductions. A sophist operates with paradoxes. A "public intellectual" operates with buzzwords.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
It is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.
David Hume
In the heat of the battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns - all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist
Jean-Paul Sarte
For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils.
Plato
The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Amintirea plăcerilor este mai de durată și mai de încredere decât prezența lor.
Seneca
A metaphysical understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how it all fits together, in general and abstract terms, could be the most real and important thing there is. In that case, we don't do metaphysics so that we can stay healthy and wealthy: we want to stay healthy and wealthy so that we can do metaphysics.
Stephen Mumford
In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm-tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler; and all the while the native, bent double, near dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey... Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.
Frantz Fanon