Quotes by Philosophers - Page 375

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
Ayn Rand
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
Ayn Rand
What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
Umberto Eco
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Albert Camus
LoveEmbracing Tao, you become embraced.Supple, breathing gently, you become reborn.Clearing your vision, you become clear.Nurturing your beloved, you become impartial.Opening your heart, you become accepted.Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.Bearing and nurturing,Creating but not owning,Giving without demanding,Controlling without authority,This is love.
Lao Tzu
The reality of loving God is loving him like he's a Superhero who actually saved you from stuff rather than a Santa Claus who merely gave you some stuff.
Criss Jami
Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.
Criss Jami
Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.
Rabindranath Tagore
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne
The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person--without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.
Osho
Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.
Osho
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Alain de Botton
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love
Erich Fromm
It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self.
Criss Jami
Haven't I? - he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ...He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her ...Since the first time I saw you ...Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ...Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed ...You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved - as if you were a man? ...Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life - the only person I respected - the best business man I know - my ally - my partner in a desperate battle ...The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met ...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you cant conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!
Ayn Rand
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion
Simone de Beauvoir
With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you - that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.
Osho
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.
Osho
One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don't leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.
Osho
To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.
Augustine of Hippo
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If love is blind, then maybe a blind person that loves has a greater understanding of it.
Criss Jami
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu
We're all golden sunflowers inside.
Allen Ginsberg
If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
John O'Donohue
To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.
Criss Jami
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.
Marcus Aurelius
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Unending LoveI seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...In life after life, in age after age, forever.My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,It's ancient tale of being apart or together.As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.At the heart of time, love of one for another.We have played along side millions of lovers,Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,the distressful tears of farewell,Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in youThe love of all man's days both past and forever:Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -And the songs of every poet past and forever.
Rabindranath Tagore
I would rather a romantic relationship turn into contempt than turn into apathy. The passion in the extremities make it appear as though it once meant something. We grow from hot or cold, but lukewarm is the biggest insult.
Criss Jami
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.
Bruce Lee
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.
Blaise Pascal
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.
Cornel West
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Love is a serious mental disease.
Plato
...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...
Plato
You're my Star, a stargazer too,and I wish that I were Heaven,with a billion eyes to look at you!
Plato
Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
Plato
Wise men speak because they have something to say: Fools because they have to say something
Plato
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Plato
One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
Plato
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
Plato
Philosophy is the highest music.
Plato
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
Plato
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Plato
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
There is nothing that is going to make people hate you more, and love you more, than telling the truth.
Stefan Molyneux
In love, one and one are one.
Jean-Paul Sartre
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
John Ruskin
Love is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
G.K. Chesterton
A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.
Elbert Hubbard