Quotes by Philosophers - Page 374

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...
Marcus Aurelius
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..
Henry David Thoreau
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
Heraclitus
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.
Jean-Paul Sartre
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Søren Kierkegaard
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.
Nikos Kazantzakis
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
Simone de Beauvoir
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Aldous Huxley
It is not the length of life, but the depth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Søren Kierkegaard
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
Ayn Rand
There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Marcus Aurelius
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
G.K. Chesterton
Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Nicolas Chamfort
Simplicity, patience, compassion.These three are your greatest treasures.Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.Patient with both friends and enemies,you accord with the way things are.Compassionate toward yourself,you reconcile all beings in the world.
Lao Tzu
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
Albert Schweitzer
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
Ayn Rand
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because of a great love, one is courageous.
Lao Tzu
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
Slavoj Žižek
To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.
Ayn Rand
And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
Niccolò Machiavelli
You are evidence of your mother's strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.
Criss Jami
Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.
Criss Jami
I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.
Osho
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?
Criss Jami
Love, too, has to be learned.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.
Augustine of Hippo
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
Alan W. Watts
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
Ayn Rand
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness insidethat holds whatever we want.We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner spacethat makes it livable.We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
Lao Tzu
Love, that moves the sun and the other stars
Dante Alighieri
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.
Ayn Rand
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve and bad things are very easy to get.
Confucius
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
Simone de Beauvoir
She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.
Voltaire
It's not at all hard to understand a person it's only hard to listen without bias.
Criss Jami
What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
Albert Camus
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.
Erich Fromm
I want you, Hank. I'm much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you - and the only thing I'm ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed - and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There's nothing you'll have to pretend - don't think of me, don't feel; don't care - I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it's to me you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but the sensation of pleasure which you despise - but I want it from you. You'd give up amy height of virtue for it , while I - I haven't any to give up. There's none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. Amd seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don't have to fear that you're now dependent on me. It's I who will depend on any whim of yours. You'll have me anytime you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It's such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please - I'm not afraid to admit it - I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when the things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I - as my pride. I'm more proud of it than anything I've done, more proud than of building the Line. If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.
Ayn Rand
On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
Stanisław Lem
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Love, and you shall be loved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.
Rabindranath Tagore
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm