Quotes by Philosophers - Page 83

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
G.K. Chesterton
For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
Henry David Thoreau
There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
Henry David Thoreau
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
Hans Jonas
I know that my singing doesn’t make the moon rise, nor does it make the stars shine. But without my song, the night would seem empty and incomplete. There is more to daybreak than light, just as there is more to nighttime than darkness.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?
Jonathan Edwards
Everyone prays to his own god, that's why miracles happen to some and not to others
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience.
G.K. Chesterton
In a remarkable midrash (commentary) on Proverbs, we read the following: “All of the festivals will be abolished in the future [the Messianic Age], but Purim will never be abolished.”The miracle of Purim is very different from the miracles mentioned in the Torah. While the latter were overt miracles, such as the ten plagues in Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea, the miracle of Purim was covert. No law of nature was violated in the Purim story and the Jews were saved by seemingly normal historical occurrences. Had we lived in those days, we would have noticed nothing unusual. Only retroactively are we astonished that seemingly unrelated and insignificant human acts led to the redemption of the Jews. The discovery that these events concealed a miracle could only be made after the fact.Covert miracles will never cease to exist explains the Torah Temimah. In fact, they take place every day. The midrash on Proverbs is not suggesting that the actual festivals mentioned in the Torah will be nullified in future days. Rather we should read the midrash as follows: Overt miracles, which we celebrate on festivals mentioned in the Torah, no longer occur. But covert miracles such as those celebrated on Purim will never end; they continue to occur every day of the year. Purim, probably rooted in a historical event of many years ago, functions as a constant reminder that the Purim story never ended. We are still living it. The Megillah is open-ended; it was not and will never be completed!
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
[I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages’ poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened? One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth—when they were not meant as such—is the distortion of our expectations.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.
Dallas Willard
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
G.K. Chesterton
The purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient’s conversion to the therapist’s interpretation.
Adolf Grünbaum
And most importantly, the next time someone asks you "Who are you?" you must answer in this simple way, with sincerity and conviction: "I am an Earth Citizen
Ilchi Lee
I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You carry the message you've been seeking, but realization of it is found in healthy retrospection, not among the wilderness of chaotic noise.
T.F. Hodge
Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.
Marcus Aurelius
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations—the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.
Alan W. Watts
...we can choose to be truthful even when the choice means personal loss. We can choose to undertake a great action - unselfish, courageous, daringly creative - that looks unreasonable and irrational to the eye of the Ego.
Ilchi Lee
no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time
Plato
Some people should never be told truth. Their stomachs are not mature enough for that type of food
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Truth was not meant to be told but found
Bangambiki Habyarimana
As the sun does not wait for prayers and incantations tob e induced to rise, but immediately shines and is saluted by all, so do you also not wait for clappings of hands and shouts of praise tob e induced to do good, but be a doer of good voluntarily and you will be beloved as much as the sun.
Epictetus
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.
Thomas Paine
...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.
Ayn Rand
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.
Ayn Rand
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
Ayn Rand
If I start from a place of love, more times than not I will find what is "right," but if I start from a position of "right" I will rarely find love.
Edward Mooney
All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.
John Stuart Mill
Forget about life, forget about worrying about right and wrong. Plunge into the unknown and the endless and find your place there!
Zhuangzi
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Ayn Rand
The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.
Ayn Rand
He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Ayn Rand
A business is an army;you are the general,and your subordinates are your troops.Victory is achieving your goals.Great victory is surpassing your goals.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There are two kinds of warriors:those on the battlefield,and those in the boardroom;both are out to win.But the age of King Alexander has gone,and the age of Bill Gates has come.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In reality, I am not dependent, butSo as to keep dignity of the GenerousI have resorted to beggary.
Bedil
Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.
Niccolò Machiavelli
An angry enemy is a conquered enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Tomorrow is like 'there.' Once you get 'there,' it is called 'here.' So, technically, life is a set of Todays.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To lose weight, spend time at the gym. To appear like you’ve lost weight, spend time with people who are bigger than you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Twitter gives people an illusionary sense of leadership.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A push-up bra is to a woman’s chest … what 'breathing-in' is to a man’s stomach.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
Muhammad Iqbal
Once you transcend the external differences, anything can be merged with anything.
Liezi
I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.
Isaiah Berlin
Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.
Aldous Huxley
How many minutes will still die in the swamp of your illusion of being human?
Sorin Cerin
Could there ever be a wise man without the wisdom or life or without the death of illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Voltaire
How much weight can carry a thought which does not acknowledge that it is an illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Where do we people go if not towards the perfection of our own illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Facebook gives people an illusory sense of being LIKED.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana