Quotes by Philosophers - Page 71

You say you need to love others, but do you love yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness
Friedrich Nietzsche
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
G.K. Chesterton
The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.
Aldous Huxley
That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.
Aldous Huxley
The Ideal age for marriage in men is 35. The Ideal age for marriage in women is 18
Aristotle
[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.
Will Durant
Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself.
Simone de Beauvoir
Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life
Friedrich Nietzsche
The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart.
Mencius
And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.
Voltaire
What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?
Voltaire
Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.
G.K. Chesterton
To connect is to dissolve the imaginary pyramids of artificial privilege.
Stefan Molyneux
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Albert Schweitzer
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
Albert Schweitzer
Man can no longer live for himself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe.
Albert Schweitzer
Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".
U.G. Krishnamurti
You should love yourself to an extent where you can't let anyone take advantage of you, no matter who they are.
Gift Gugu Mona
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
Sages are soldiers on the war on ignorance.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The greatest prison in the universe is an ignorant mind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The enlightened are superior to the learned.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Saints are slaves of good works.Sages are slaves of wisdom.Conquerors are slaves of victory.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A sage is a good teacher, but an even greater learner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The enlightened worry less than others,quarrel less than others,fight less than others,transgress less than others;care more than others,give more than others,and love more than others.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Greater than a sage is the one who taught him; God is the teacher, and the wise are all His students.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One deed from a sage achieves more than a thousand deeds from warriors.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A sage benefits from his mistakes more than a fool benefits from his triumphs.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you want to punish a sage lock him in the same room with a fool.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A fish is a genius in water.An eagle is a genius in air.A fox is a genius on land.A sage is a genius in life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A day with a sage will save you a thousand of study.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One sage is worth more than a thousand warriors.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Great sages began as great students.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
Anyone can be tough for a season. It takes a special kind of human to rise to life's challenges for a lifetime.
Chris Matakas
There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.
Julius Evola
There are no mineral monsters.
Canguilhem
The more closely two organisms depend upon each other the harder it becomes to tell where one organism ends and the other begins.
Chris Matakas
Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.
Jonathan Glover
Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.
Evan Thompson
Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.
Alfred Korzybski
New York is a sucked orange.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read
G.K. Chesterton
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
Elbert Hubbard
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Albert Camus
He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
Ayn Rand
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Ayn Rand
We can lose the roll, we can lose position, but we can constantly strive to win the moment.
Chris Matakas
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.
Albert Camus
Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.
Michel de Montaigne
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, ‘Am I happy?’ and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, ‘No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.' Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first…Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there. In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
We are in misery because we are creatures of self - the self that is unyielding and narrow, that reflects no light, that is blind to the infinite. Our self is loud with its own discordant clamour - it is not the tuned harp whose chords vibrate with the music of the eternal. Sighs of discontent and weariness of failure, idle regrets for the past and anxieties for the future are troubling our shallow hearts because we have not found our souls, and the self-revealing spirit has not been manifest within us. Hence our cry.
Rabindranath Tagore
If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never having been a motiveor principle of action, it is invoked only to appeaseconscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever wedetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to itand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,and do so all the better if we disguise asconvictions the misery we want to share, to lavish onothers. However glamorous its appearances, proselytismnonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No oneis willing to endure alone the discipline he may evenhave assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'sbonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberatebut to enchain.Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he enviesyour vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas orslogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.
Emil M. Cioran
He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.
Aldous Huxley