Quotes by Philosophers - Page 4

I have argued that when we encounter other humans we experience them first as persons, and cannot help but do so. This means that in order to see a human person as an animal or organism we must abstract from the totality of our experience. My suggestion is that we take this fact seriously in understanding the ontology of everyday objects. According to this proposal a “human animal” or “human organism” is not a thing in its own right, but rather a particular perspective we take on ourselves and our lives, one that attends only to our purely biological functions.
Marya Schechtman
Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ludwig Feuerbach
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.
Albert Camus
Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He alone is a man who keeps his word:Not that he has one thing in the heart, and another on the tongue.
Guru Gobind Singh
Sure, some of us humans might be angry at a sovereign God about Hell, but know that that is about as meaningful as a few germs being angry at humans about bleach.
Criss Jami
Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
J.M. Bernstein
To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
Peter Sloterdijk
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way.
Criss Jami
But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.
Robert M. Pirsig
The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do.
Stefan Molyneux
Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benefit of the sinner. One might read Christ's answer to his disciples' question regarding why a man had been born blind - 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him' (John 9:3) - either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if - setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as superstitious, stochastic, and secondary - we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
David Bentley Hart
Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.
Criss Jami
Envy: Instead of focusing on your own goals, your goal becomes throwing off the rails other people’s goals and at the end of the day you gain nothing but a mischievous satisfaction that you have destroyed someone’s dream
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
Democritus
Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
Karl Marx
The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Some people's theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.
Criss Jami
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
G.K. Chesterton
Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.
Criss Jami
examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.
Gregory B. Sadler
The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.
Anthony Collins
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
Criss Jami
When you're appeasing too much, you might be egotistically over-estimating everyone's need for your approval.
Criss Jami
It's easy to make a mess when you're not the one who has to clean it up.
Criss Jami
Perhaps a seemingly dull, boring person is not a person who lacks personality, but rather a person with so much personality most other things bore them.
Criss Jami
The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.
Criss Jami
But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples - who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29) - be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self? Are we not above all called to subject ourselves to our Domine and conform to his image? Of course, we are called not to conform to the patterns of 'this world' (Rom. 12:2) or to our previous evil desires (1 Peter 1:14), but that is a call not to nonconformity as such but rather to an alternative conformity through a counterformation in Christ, a transformation and renewal directed toward conformity to his image. By appropriating the liberal Enlightenment notion of negative freedom and participating in its nonconformist resistance to discipline (and hence a resistance to the classical spiritual disciplines), Christians are in fact being conformed to the patterns of this world (contra Rom. 12:2).
James K.A. Smith
Maths is at only one remove from magic.
Neel Burton
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
Gilles Deleuze
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed
Criss Jami
When you think there is nothing left to improve on, your business dies, for there is no shortage of innovators
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty has deceived many of us into believing that some people who are in that state love the food, clothes, places, and people that they do not even like. The same can be said about wealth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Love is the brightest star in the soul's sky.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love's light conquers hate's darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
f you are too good to look after God’s trash, you are not good enough to look after God’s treasure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Keep negative people in your prayers, not in your life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is the only flame that can light up your soul and universe simultaneously.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.
Henry David Thoreau
Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
Hypatia
You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do...and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.
Criss Jami
It's true not because it's beyond doubt, but because we believe it to be true. We make it true. We are safe as long as no one can disprove us
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I may not have had a great background, but I am grateful because nothing could have prepared me for the future than the past I've been through.
Gift Gugu Mona
My life doesn't bore me, because I know its worth. So when I let you be part of it, ensure you add value and not attempt to devalue it; or else you can never be part of my future.
Gift Gugu Mona
Learn how they failed and succeeded, then fail on and succeed
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Dream what others do not.Imagine what others have not.Do what others will not.Achieve what others could not.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The eagle only knows how high it can fly when it spreads its wings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The palaces faith builds are greater than the prisons fear creates.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Stars shine so they can see the world, not so the world can see them.
Matshona Dhliwayo