Quotes by Philosophers - Page 37

Unconsciousness spontaneity instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit it is worse than a chance lost it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
Instinct is untaught ability.
Alexander Bain
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.
Alfred North Whitehead
No man was ever great without a touch of divine afflatus.
Cicero
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Plato
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the ru)e.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
Aristotle
Whoever blushes is already guilty true innocence is ashamed of nothing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
Albert Camus
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours.
Henry David Thoreau
I teach that all men are mad.
Horace
Recompense injury with justice and recompense kindness with kindness.
Confucius
The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill
In an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Machiavelli
In this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
Pythagoras
We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
Edmund Burke
If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been changed.
Pascal
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not to he who is offensive to us are we most unfair but to he who does not concern us at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Once conform once do what others do because they do it and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Michel de Montaigne
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one could ever meet death for his country without the hope of immortality.
Cicero
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
A good imitation is the most perfect originality.
Voltaire
Every man is a borrower and a mimic life is theatrical and literature a quotation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
Publilius Syrus
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty justice and happiness which is everything in this world.
Pascal
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
George Santayana
Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead
I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of wha. I do not know.
Cicero
No one knows what he can do until he tries.
Publilius Syrus
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
To write a good love letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Men are always averse to enterprises in which they foresee difficulties.
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though limits to our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance.
Baltasar Gracián
An impossibility does not disturb us until its accomplishment shows what fools we were.
Henry S. Haskins
Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.
Baltasar Gracián
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This ... is a precious gift.
Paul Valéry
I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
Cicero
Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
Amos Bronson Alcott
He is not only idle who does nothing but he is idle who might be better employed.
Socrates
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest without passion without business without entertainment without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty insufficient dependent ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom gloom sorrow chagrin resentment and despair.
Blaise Pascal
If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot set him to do nothing.
Blaise Pascal
If I cannot brag of knowing something then I brag of not knowing it at any rate brag.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
William James
The material universe exists only in the mind.
Jonathan Edwards
More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk beat his wife - and watch TV.
Robert M. Hutchins
Only the wise possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
George Santayana
Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
Ideas won't keep: something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead