Quotes by Philosophers - Page 79

Even when the truth is in fact simple, simplicity is still relative.
Criss Jami
I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.
Henry David Thoreau
The Master, by residing in the Tao,sets an example for all beings.Because he doesn't display himself,people can see his light.Because he has nothing to prove,people can trust his words.Because he doesn't know who he is,people recognize themselves in him.Because he has no goal in mind,everything he does succeeds.
Lao Tzu
The tailor bird builds her nest in deep woods, she uses no more than one branch.The mole drinks off the river, it can only fill one belly.
Zhuangzi
Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow – that is where joy resides. For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds.
Confucius
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Henry David Thoreau
A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.
Confucius
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau
A book is a writer's will:ideas are the inheritance.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
It is not enough to read many books, you have to read the right ones.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Books record knowledge,preserve wisdom,and disseminate information;nourishing minds, changing lives.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A fool can read a thousand books and learn nothing.A wise person can read one and become great. Using books for decoration is what ordinary men do. Using books for knowledge is what intelligent people do.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Books have more useful things to say than fools.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A teacher instructs;a student absorbs.A book is a companion;a good one, a messiah.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.
Antonio Gramsci
There are no trophies for the real victories in life.
Chris Matakas
There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory.
G.K. Chesterton
Victory honours the brave.
Gift Gugu Mona
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.
Francis Bacon
God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion!
D.T. Suzuki
You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself.
Pascal Mercier
Have you ever thought of yourself as a great being?Have you ever been deeply moved by a thought that came from inside? One day, I heard a voice inside me sincerely concerned for the future of the earth and humanity. That voice asked, Would a world where all life forms on this earth live together in peace and harmony be impossible? That voice answered, If all people really wanted that and chose that kind of world, why wouldn't it come true?
Ilchi Lee
Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God.
Charles Taylor
The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga.
Rabindranath Tagore
There, where millions of Krishnas stand with hands folded, Where millions of Vishnus bow their heads, Where millions of Brahmâs are reading the Vedas, Where millions of Shivas are lost in contemplation, Where millions of Indras dwell in the sky, Where the demi-gods and the munis are unnumbered, Where millions of Saraswatis, Goddess of Music, play on the vina— There is my Lord self-revealed: and the scent of sandal and flowers dwells in those deeps.
Kabir
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
Eric Hoffer
Immature loves says ' I love because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long.With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc.That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.
Noam Chomsky
The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.
Richard J. Mouw
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
Patriotism, whether it is of the Western kind, or of the Eastern kind, is the same, a poison in human beings that is really distorting thought. So patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease. When, in time of war, the whole world talks of patriotism, you will know the falseness of it, and therefore you will act as a true human being
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Now that a full flood of music has swept over our country, let Nikhil practise his scales, while we rouse the land with our cracked voices[.]
Rabindranath Tagore
But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid, but not less salutary, stream.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.
Jonathan Sacks
Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell
Identification with the rag called the national flag is an emotional and sentimental factor and for that factor you are willing to kill another - and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor . . .? One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in, love is not.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.
G.K. Chesterton
What is discipline? Discipline means creating an order within you. As you are, you are a chaos.
Osho
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
Alain de Botton
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
Isaiah Berlin
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stéphane Lupasco
People who get offended by your not saying 'Thank you!' … after they’ve paid you a compliment were merely desperate to be thanked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him.
Henry David Thoreau
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
Voltaire
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )
John Stuart Mill
And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.
Ayn Rand
Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.
David Hume
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!
G.K. Chesterton
Do not risk your life for someone who does not care about you.
Gift Gugu Mona
Live in insecurity! Live in revolution! Be a rebel! Risk, because nothing is ever attained in life without risk. The more you risk, the closer you are to God. When you can risk all, all is yours.
Osho
It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.
Seneca
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Henry David Thoreau
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
Blaise Pascal