Quotes by Philosophers - Page 68

When we look at something, we are often not aware of who is perceiving, and unaware of the mental-emotional filter created by past experiences, hopes and expectations.
Ilchi Lee
Conscience is the absolute truthfulness perceived, which comes from Nothing, our true nature, and as such reflects things exactly the way they are.
Ilchi Lee
Recalibration comes from experiencing Nothingness, being open to emptiness as the ultimate reality and our nature. It is the purest mind, the Energy-Consciousness itself.
Ilchi Lee
Religion is not God himself or herself. It is a system of teaching about God, an explanation of God’s way to human minds. But God doesn’t need explanations to exist.
Ilchi Lee
. . . when you are stressed, if you take three deep breaths before you say or do anything, this will help prevent you from making choices you might regret later.
Ilchi Lee
Conscience is the manifestation of our divine nature, the absolute truthfulness that we all have inside, that resides beyond the instinctive desire to survive.
Ilchi Lee
For most people, meditation is associated with relaxation and peace of mind, and these are the practical reasons many people seek out, learn, and practice meditation. However, relaxation and peace of mind are only half of the uses of meditation. The other, probably more important aspect, is for creation.
Ilchi Lee
With the muscles of our body, we can lift and move heavy things. With the muscle of integrity, we can turn intention into powerful action. That’s how we can earn trust from our conscience, and can truly believe in ourselves.
Ilchi Lee
Our true nature doesn’t need any explanation or demonstration to know itself. It just knows because knowing is part of its nature.
Ilchi Lee
Conscience, the divine nature within us, sees everything as connected, what’s good for all is always its priority.
Ilchi Lee
Breathing is the master key of life.
Ilchi Lee
The ancient teaching of Tao tells us that knowing what you really are is wisdom, and living it is virtue.
Ilchi Lee
The intention to be absolutely truthful and the willingness to put the benefit of all before personal benefit hold the power to change the world.
Ilchi Lee
The essence of enlightenment … is a big understanding, which gives you a deep and wide perspective to see the world as a whole, and a capacity to accept with compassion all that is. 11/26
Ilchi Lee
What is enlightenment? In the Korean tradition of Tao, it is known a Mu-Ah (Mu means “No” or “Nothing” and Ah means “Me”). It is no-me-ness, or egoless-ness. It means realizing the true, unchanging nature of the person you happen to be.
Ilchi Lee
Behind our behaviors are our beliefs. They determine how we think things are and what is possible. The foundation of these beliefs is our conception of who we are, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Ilchi Lee
You're given the fruit of one palm tree:Bear it a basin of clear water.Don't trouble with the plight of other palms.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
...the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards.
Ayn Rand
It’s a law of survival, isn’t it?—to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.
Ayn Rand
The best fighter is not a Boxer, Karate or Judo man. The best fighter is someone who can adapt on any style. He kicks too good for a Boxer, throws too good for a Karate man, and punches too good for a Judo man.
Bruce Lee
I like visionaries because they choose to see the best in the worst of situations.
Gift Gugu Mona
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.
Stefan Molyneux
If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!
Ayn Rand
Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...
Jean-Paul Sartre
This should be one of the basic attitudes—not to think about what the other is doing. That is his life. If he decides to live it that way, that is his business. Who are you even to have an opinion about it? Even to have an opinion means that you are ready to interfere, you have already interfered.
Osho
Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.
Confucius
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.
U.G. Krishnamurti
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that while they are always talking of things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is. A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.
G.K. Chesterton
Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes
You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.
Criss Jami
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
John Cage
When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know.
Matthew B. Crawford
Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
Rebecca Goldstein
One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.
Denis Diderot
It is a shock to many college graduates that their segway into the real world is one of obligation, profound debt, and countless sacrifices of the soul.
Chris Matakas
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
Alain de Botton
Drinking the energy of the universeBreathing along with the CosmosWith each breathI am rebornInto a brand new existence.
Ilchi Lee
All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.
Swami Vivekananda
...dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.
Ayn Rand
I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.
G.K. Chesterton
The best way to destroy your enemies is to make them adopt your worldview
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Some enemies are part and parcel of our lives, we cannot destroy them without risking our own survival
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
John Stuart Mill
Keep quiet and the enemy will reveal himself.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.
Henry David Thoreau
Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)
Voltaire
If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier.
Stephen Cave
What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
Sam Harris
If God did not arrange [the world] this way, then there must be an independent factor in the universe. And if there is such, one consequence and perhaps two follow. First, the doctrine of creation must be abandoned. A creation ex nihilo would be completely in God's control. Independent forces cannot be created forces, and created forces cannot be independent. Then, second, if the universe is not God's creation, his knowledge of it--past and future--cannot depend on what he intends to do, but on his observation of how it works. In such a case, how could we be sure that God's observations are accurate? How could we be sure that these independent forces will not later show an unsuspected twist that will falsify God's predictions? And, finally, on this view God's knowledge would be empirical, rather than an integral part of his essence, and thus he would be a dependent knower. These objections are insurmountable. We can consistently believe in creation, omnipotence, omniscience, and the divine decree. But we cannot retain sanity and combine any one of these with free will.
Gordon H. Clark
Technically, according to the notion of the will of God, there is no such a thing as a competent surgeon.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are not self-caused little gods.
Sam Harris
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Thomas Carlyle
Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act...
Aristotle
[...T]he ways of God have been manifested beyond example: the sea is divided, the cloud has led the way, the rock has poured forth water, it has rained manna, everything has contributed to your greatness; you ought to do the rest. God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority.
Friedrich A. Hayek
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Friedrich A. Hayek
You can do what you will: but at each given moment of your life you can will only one determined thing and by no means anything other than this one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition, or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct.
John Locke