Quotes by Philosophers - Page 80

Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”“Of course.”“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”“It isn’t.”“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me....
Ayn Rand
Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me...
Ayn Rand
The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others".
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Time, place, and space for all things, but spending [the] majority of one's time playing in outer places, and far less time exploring inner space, is perhaps the worst form of neglect. Don't play yourself; the real you awaits.
T.F. Hodge
‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.
Henry David Thoreau
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
Henry David Thoreau
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Will Durant
A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
Will Durant
What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
Will Durant
Civilization has made life a humanized jungle, a sugar coated jungle, but still a jungle
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.
Will Durant
Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.
Nick Bostrom
If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
G.K. Chesterton
Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies fromindifference toward the unique values which created it.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Aldous Huxley
It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.
Aldous Huxley
The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.
Marquis de Sade
What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?
Stanisław Lem
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
Voltaire
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel Foucault
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Say farewell to luck when winning. It is the way of the gamblers of reputation. Quite as important as a gallant advance is a well-planned retreat. Lock up your winnings when they are enough, or when great. Continuous luck is always suspect; more secure is that which changes. Though half bitter and half sweet, it is more satisfying to the taste. The more luck pyramids, the greater the danger of slip and collapse. For luck always compensates her intensity by her brevity. Fortune wearies of carrying anyone long upon her shoulders.
Baltasar Gracián
A live broke man is 'luckier' than a dead rich man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Fact be virtuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth
Thomas Hobbes
In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the blue: "I wish you luck." I am astonished; but later I realize that these words connect up with his thoughts about me.And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
...luck is not to be coerced.
Albert Camus
There are rules to luck, not everything is chance for the wise; luck can be helped by skill.
Baltasar Gracián
Worry is to human beings … what a condom is to a man with erectile dysfunction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Being in a hurry is the father of stress and worry.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Chances are that whatever that you are worried about—be it a person or a thing—isn’t worried about you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The religious worry about life after death at the expense of life before death.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We ask ourselves: have we made progress? We are almost never aware of it. Only with effort and discipline do we become fully conscious. If we keep a journal, now and then we are startled when we peruse past entries. Worries, fears, preoccupations of the previous year seem to have evanesced. The greatest terrors and strongest urgencies of five years ago now surprise, embarrass, or encourage us. Was this me? Why was it that I could not gauge it as it was lived?
John F. Kavanaugh
Planning is worrying based on facts
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
Thomas Carlyle
If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.
Śāntideva
Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.
Voltaire
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.
Thomas Paine
Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, largerphenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease oftime; life, again, a disease of matter.Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itselfis only an infirmity of God.
Emil M. Cioran
To survive in a corrupt country, you need to be the son of a king or be king yourself.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
Geoffrey Chaucer
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Seneca
And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.
Aldous Huxley
He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?
Aldous Huxley
Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.
Allan Bloom
If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.
David Hume
To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.
Truman G. Madsen
Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.
Sorin Cerin
Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
Pyotr Kropotkin
Our athiests are pious people.
Max Stirner
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
Slavoj Žižek
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx
If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them
Karl Marx
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly.
Karl Jaspers