Quotes by Philosophers - Page 368

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Henry David Thoreau
When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
Jostein Gaarder
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
Aristotle
Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Translation by Sharon Lebell
Epictetus
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars
Seneca
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Albert Camus
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
The menu is not the meal.
Alan W. Watts
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
Epictetus
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.
Albert Camus
The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Ayn Rand
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
Henry David Thoreau
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
Noam Chomsky
Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.
Lao Tzu
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure
Arthur Schopenhauer
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
Erich Fromm
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
Albert Camus
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
Albert Camus
Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
Jostein Gaarder
If you understand others you are smart.If you understand yourself you are illuminated.If you overcome others you are powerful.If you overcome yourself you have strength.If you know how to be satisfied you are rich.If you can act with vigor, you have a will.If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting.If you die without loss, you are eternal.
Lao Tzu
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
Aristotle
If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.
Epictetus
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
Heraclitus
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
Ayn Rand
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Socrates
An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.
Albert Camus
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.
Lao Tzu
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think
Socrates
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus
A day without laughter is a day wasted.
Nicolas Chamfort
Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?
Marquis de Sade
It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
Michel de Montaigne
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
G.K. Chesterton
Everyone has a sense of humor. If you don't laugh at jokes, you probably laugh at opinions.
Criss Jami
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
G.K. Chesterton
We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.
John Locke
The secret to humor is surprise.
Aristotle
...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
Frantz Fanon
There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson