Quotes by Philosophers - Page 51

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
Bertrand Russell
He is a drunkard who takes more than three glasses though he be not drunk.
Epictetus
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.
Albert Camus
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
If a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts but if he will content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
To teach how to live with uncertainty yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.
Bertrand Russell
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
Eric Hoffer
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides never decides.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Doubt is not a pleasant state but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
We sail within a vast sphere ever drifting in uncertainty driven from end to end.
Blaise Pascal
We are not certain we are never certain.
Albert Camus
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
Sir Francis Bacon
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Syrus
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal.
I-Ching
Disappointments are to the soul what a thunder-storm is to the air.
Friedrich von Schiller
No great thing is created suddenly any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom then bear fruit then ripen.
Epictetus
Patience and fortitude conquer all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time is like a river of fleeting events and its current is strong as soon as something comes into sight it is swept past us and something else takes its place and that too will be swept away.
Marcus Aurelius
We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
Adopt the pace of nature her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If matters go badly now they will not always be so.
Horace
We do not live an equal life but one of contrasts and patchwork now a little joy then a sorrow now a sin then a generous or brave action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ail hope abandon ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Aristotle
Democracy is a festival of mediocrity.
E. M. Cioran
Democracy means government by the uneducated while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G.K. Chesterton
The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
Rabindranath Tagore
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
Pascal
Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.
Francis Bacon
A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
What must be shall be and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes but what our purposes are to be.
Norbert Weiner
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight indecision a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
Gordon Graham
When you have to make a choice and don't make it that is in itself a choice.
William James
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
No one knows what he can to do until he tries.
Publilius Syrus
Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.
Vauvenargues
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
If decisions were a choice between alternatives decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.
Kenneth Burke
Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Lewis Mumford
Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed or exempt from danger.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Choose always the way that seems the best however rough it may be custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
Pythagoras
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past present and future state and at others whom it affects and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
As a man thinketh so is he and as a man chooseth so is he.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Albert Camus
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Plato
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now I am about to take my last voyage a great leap in the dark.
Thomas Hobbes
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Aldous Huxley
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.
George Santayana