Quotes by Philosophers - Page 370

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
Simone de Beauvoir
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer
There is no illusion greater than fear.
Lao Tzu
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell
The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The moment you become miserly you are closed to the basic phenomenon of life: expansion, sharing. The moment you start clinging to things, you have missed the target--you have missed. Because things are not the target, you, your innermost being, is the target--not a beautiful house, but a beautiful you; not much money, but a rich you; not many things, but an open being, available to millions of things.
Osho
Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.
Bruce Lee
Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
Lao Tzu
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
The More we value things, the less we value ourselves
Bruce Lee
In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.
Augustine of Hippo
Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?
Marcus Aurelius
Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?""I've felt it all my life," she said.
Ayn Rand
To save all we must risk all.
Friedrich Schiller
Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot.
Criss Jami
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
G.K. Chesterton
Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
Augustine of Hippo
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
Noam Chomsky
Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man is free who is not master of himself.
Epictetus
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
Martin Buber
We are constantly invited to be what we are.
Henry David Thoreau
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau
Strength is Life, Weakness is Death.Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death.Love is Life, Hatred is Death.
Swami Vivekananda
The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.
Socrates
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
John Cage
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
Meister Eckhart
There isa time to liveand a time to diebut never to reject the moment.
Lao Tzu
Don't go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.
Marcus Aurelius
The Man who says he can, and the man who says he can not.. Are both correct
Confucius
Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.
Confucius
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The doubters said, "Man can not fly," The doers said, "Maybe, but we'll try," And finally soared In the morning glow While non-believers Watched from below.
Bruce Lee
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau
Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.
Patañjali
They alone live, who live for others.
Swami Vivekananda
There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
G.K. Chesterton
Anything that makes weak - physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.
Swami Vivekananda
A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.
Criss Jami
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Arthur Schopenhauer
Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Voltaire
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
John Stuart Mill
When people see some things as beautiful,other things become ugly.When people see some things as good,other things become bad.
Lao Tzu
Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!
Karl Marx
That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Bertrand Russell
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
Maimonides
You can only be afraid of what you think you know.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Henry David Thoreau
Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here.
Lao Tzu
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
Epicurus
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant