Quotes by Philosophers - Page 66

Isn’t reading a kind of preparation for life?’ But life is composed of things other than books. It is as if an athlete, on entering the stadium, were to complain that he’s not outside exercising.This was the goal of your exercise, of your weights, your practice ring and your training partners.
Epictetus
If, on the other hand, we read books entitled On Impulse not just out of idle curiosity, but in order to exercise impulse correctly; books entitled On Desire and On Aversion so as not to fail to get what we desire or fall victim to what we would rather avoid; and books entitled On Moral Obligation in order to honour our relationships and never do anything that clashes or conflicts with this principle; then we wouldn’t get frustrated and grow impatient with our reading. Instead we would be satisfied to act accordingly. And rather than reckon, as we are used to doing, ‘How many lines I read, or wrote, today,’ we would pass in review how ‘I applied impulse today the way the philosophers recommend
Epictetus
Once I was liable to the same mistakes, but, thanks to God, no longer …’Well, isn’t it just as worthwhile to have devoted and applied yourself to this goal as to have read or written fifty pages?
Epictetus
Never read a book that is not a year old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you have ever wanted to serve god, go on and serve him. Don't wait to be authorized by anybody. He is not copyrighted
Bangambiki Habyarimana
So what is it that you are doing - seeking security in your restlessness? The desire to be secure is one of the most curious things. And that security must be recognized by the world; I don't know whether you see this. I write a book and in the book I find my security. But that book must be recognized by the world, otherwise there is no security. So look what I've done - my security lies in the opinion of the world!...So it means I am deceiving myself constantly.
Krishnamurti
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days.
Ayn Rand
Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability.
Immanuel Kant
Haste denies all acts their dignity.
Dante Alighieri
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
Jonathan Glover
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
G.K. Chesterton
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
Aristotle
In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' — and this is beyond Y.It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this — that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge?
Roland Puccetti
A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way.
Joseph McCabe
The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...
Oswald Spengler
Don’t tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.
Ayn Rand
Fact is is always truth but truth is not always fact
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Celia Green
A key point to bear in mind: The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.
Marcus Aurelius
Time is a created thing. To say, "I don't have time" is like saying "I don't want to.
Lau-tzu
He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.
Dante Alighieri
A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.
Will Durant
But only a brief momentis granted to the braveone breath or two, whose wage isThe long nights of the grave.
Muhammad Iqbal
Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed
Paulo Freire
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, butthe tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression.Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa,have long expelled her.?Europe regards her like a stranger, and Englandhath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare intime an asylum for mankind.
Thomas Paine
119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people.
Cornel West
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
Paulo Freire
P20 - The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.
Paulo Freire
The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.
Cornel West
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?
Paulo Freire
In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
Hannah Arendt
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
Paulo Freire
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
Albert Camus
Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
Paulo Freire
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
Paulo Freire
The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
Paulo Freire
To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.
Paulo Freire
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Emil M. Cioran
People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities.
Voltaire
If thou sustain injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it
Democritus
Thy designs are a bottomless pit. How can I descend into this pit to examine it? Thou lookest thousands of years into the future and then Thou judgest. What today seems an injustice to man's minute brain becomes, thousands of years hence, the mother of man's salvation. If what today we term injustice did not exist, perhaps true justice would never come to mankind.
Nikos Kazantzakis
I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?
Francis Bacon
Nothing can justify injustice.
Ayn Rand
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
Montesquieu
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
Walter Benjamin
A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
Theodor W. Adorno
In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.
John Marmysz
By engaging with film illusions both actively and passively – as I attempt to do in this book – we strengthen the capacity of our minds to reason, imagine and think through ideas in a way unrestrained by some static conception of objective Truth. In so doing, the nihilistic gap existing between the real world and the whole variety of film worlds perhaps widens, but it also serves to offer a free, open space into which our interpretations may spill, mingle and propagate in uninhibited, nihilistic liberty.
John Marmysz
The ultimate goal of the arriviste’s aspirations is not to acquire a thing of value, but to be more highly esteemed than others. He merely uses the “thing” as an indifferent occasion for overcoming the oppressive feeling of inferiority which results from his constant comparisons.
Max Scheler
Existential envy which is directed against the other person’s very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are— that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.” This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a “pressure,” a “reproach,” and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe’s reflection that “against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.
Max Scheler
Rivalry discovers that courtesy overlooks.
Baltasar Gracián
Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Envy of other people shows how they are unhappy. Their continual attention to others behavior shows how they are boring.
Seneca
Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.
Bertrand Russell
Envy is a sign that you are being overtaken
Bangambiki Habyarimana