Quotes by Philosophers - Page 366

An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge , purify itself of errors, and progress in general enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress and the descendants would be fully justified in rejecting those decrees as having been made in an unwarranted and malicious manner..
Immanuel Kant
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Peter Singer
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
Marquis de Sade
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
My heart knows what my mind only think it knows.
Noah Benshea
A man leaves his great house because he's boredWith life at home, and suddenly returns,Finding himself no happier abroad.He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,And yawns before he's put his foot inside,Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,Or even rushes back to town again.So each man flies from himself (vain hope, becauseIt clings to him the more closely against his will)And hates himself because he is sick in mindAnd does not know the cause of his disease.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Immanuel Kant
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.
Criss Jami
And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.
Jostein Gaarder
Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn’t know when you were going to be born, nor how long you’d live for, but at any event it wouldn’t be more than a few years. All you’d know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you’d also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it’s terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out. What would you have chosen, if there had been some higher power that had gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. What you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years? Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn’t like the rules? (...) I asked myself the same question maybe times during the past few weeks. Would I have elected to live a life on earth in the firm knowledge that I’d suddenly be torn away from it, and perhaps in the middle of intoxicating happiness? (...) Well, I wasn’t sure what I would have chosen. (...) If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.
Jostein Gaarder
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
Will Durant
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Bertrand Russell
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.
Epicurus
People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the citys walls.
Heraclitus
All are one
Heraclitus
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The best ideas are common property
Seneca
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.
Epicurus
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.
Voltaire
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
G.K. Chesterton
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
Jostein Gaarder
A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
Jostein Gaarder
The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
Antonio Gramsci
It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.
Diogenes of Sinope
Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Heraclitus
How small a thought it takes to fill a life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.
Jostein Gaarder
If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.
Heraclitus
...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
Jeremy Bentham
Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.
John Rawls
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
Martin Heidegger
Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
Novalis
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.
Blaise Pascal
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
Aristotle
The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
Gilles Deleuze
I only know that I know nothing
Socrates
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery
Dante Alighieri
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
Plato was a bore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy can make people sick.
Aristotle
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
David Hume
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
Martin Heidegger
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
Max Stirner
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
René Descartes
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
Seneca