Quotes by Philosophers - Page 75

An afro is a poor man’s haircut.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists
G.K. Chesterton
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
Henry David Thoreau
The excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration ordained by god to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying “lepers” we would understand “outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the words of Christ, would condemn the behaviour of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful have always realised this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded a reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers.
Umberto Eco
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
[A man], who is in prosperity, while he sees that others have to contend with great wretchedness and that he could help them, thinks: What concern is it of mine? Let everyone be as happy as Heaven pleases, or as he can make himself; I will take nothing from him nor even envy him, only I do not wish to contribute anything to his welfare or to his assistance in distress! Now no doubt, if such a mode of thinking were a universal law, the human race might very well subsist, and doubtless even better than in a state in which everyone talks of sympathy and good-will, or even takes care occasionally to put it into practice, but, on the other side, also cheats when he can, betrays the rights of men, or otherwise violates them. But although it is possible that a universal law of nature might exist in accordance with that maxim, it is impossible to will that such a principle should have the universal validity of a law of nature. For a will which resolved this would contradict itself, inasmuch as many cases might occur in which one would have need of the love and sympathy of others, and in which, by such a law of nature, sprung from his own will, he would deprive himself of all hope of the aid he desires.
Immanuel Kant
The poor are always prophetic. As true prophets always point out, they reveal God's design. That is why we should take time to listen to them. And that means staying near them, because they speak quietly and infrequently; they are afraid to speak out, they lack confidence in themselves because they have been broken and oppressed. But if we listen to them, they will bring us back to the essential.
Jean Vanier
It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need
Thomas Aquinas
Expensive clothing is a poor man’s attempt to appear prosperous.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Visionaries see beyond the boundaries of an eyesight.
Gift Gugu Mona
The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]
Edmund Burke
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.
Brand Blanshard
Think of a "discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work].
Nick Bostrom
The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.
William James
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
G.K. Chesterton
Life is a constant build up and release of tension. If we go too far in either direction bad things happen.
Chris Matakas
As you become aware of life, you will begin to see the root cause to all your actions and reactions. Then you will realize that you are not angry with the child because he made a mistake, but because you get pleasure out of being angry. The mistake was only a excuse.
Osho
If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science.
GADAMER
You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find remarkable change taking place in you – a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything – not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying; to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus gong by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen – it is only then that there is a struggle.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.
Ayn Rand
People don't only speak with their mouths. They speak with their whole being. Sometimes they mean what they don't say and say what they don't mean; so listen with your whole being also. Let your whole being connect to theirs. Do not only listen to their voice, but also to their body language and their emotions. Listen with your ears and your heart.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn't matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen to a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband. If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate we hardly listen to what is being said. In that state there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.
Zeno of Citium
There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
G.K. Chesterton
And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name.
Seneca
To put an arrogant 'famous' singer in her place: pretend to be deaf.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Spurious fame spreads from tongue to tongue like the fog of the early dawn before the sun rises.
Rabindranath Tagore
A celebrity is an object that the media manufactures today, just so they have a subject tomorrow.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sun glasses are the unofficial celebrities’ uniform.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
Blaise Pascal
When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both – that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the "because" can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.
Rebecca Goldstein
Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.
Rebecca Goldstein
Fame is proof that people are gullible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fame for the lames, fortune for the brains.
T.F. Hodge
You just wait. I'm going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.
Bruce Lee
Only the weak hit the fly with a hammer
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer
...only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.
Paul Tillich
A wise man’s questions contain half the answer.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
A responsible step in loosening the grip of any lie we might be living is to ask ourselves, solemnly and seriously, this momentous question: "Might I be in the wrong?" What gives this question its power? The answer can be stated very simply: Just to ask the question seriously, even without answering it, is already to undergo a change of attitude.
C. Terry Warner
There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!
Thomas Carlyle
To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be…
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know.
Robert M. Pirsig
Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions
Jonathan Edwards
People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.
Bernard Williams
Hypocrisy is when you get mad at a friend for telling their other friend a secret that your other friend told you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated' frees one from hypocrisy. 'Treat others as you would like to be treated' enslaves one with insincerity.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Iris Murdoch
They will call you immoral if you dare to describe their immorality
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
Michel de Montaigne
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
Noam Chomsky
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain de Botton
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.
Eric Hoffer
When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports.
Noam Chomsky
Who you are as a person far outweighs what you do in an athletic arena.
Chris Matakas