Quotes by Philosophers - Page 88

Almost all genius up to now was one-sided—the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two—a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit—they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world—for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity—and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage—for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise.
Novalis
A genius is a grownup that remained a kid.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?
Ayn Rand
In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
Henry David Thoreau
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
Otto Weininger
I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.
Ayn Rand
An intelligent consistency is the foundation of genius.
Chris Matakas
The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best—that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?
Ayn Rand
Genius is nothing but a mastery of the subject at hand
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Sometimes geniuses create nothing new, they organize already existing material into something completely useful in other ways
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Genius lives only one storey above madness
Arthur Schopenhauer
And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.
Robert Musil
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A genius is no more—and no less—than someone who insists on the truth, while others face the other way.
Neel Burton
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.
Criss Jami
In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.
John Stuart Mill
The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more commonly so, detested for disturbing the daily peace of mind.
Criss Jami
Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions.
Kathleen Dean Moore
As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet.
Peter Singer
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Marshall McLuhan
Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.
Robert M. Pirsig
I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won't stay flat. They've got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can't imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig
Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.
Jean Baudrillard
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emil M. Cioran
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Giorgio Agamben
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.
Bertrand Russell
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.
Bertrand Russell
Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.
Jacques Maritain
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert Camus
There is no greater sorrowThan to recall a happy timeWhen miserable.
Dante Alighieri
Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.
John Stuart Mill
These days, though, tolerance means that you accept the other person's views as being true or legitimate. If you claim that someone is wrong, you can get accused of being intolerant--even though, ironically, the person making the charge of intolerance isn't being accepting of your beliefs.
Paul Copan
Beliefs are conclusions reached by men who are lazy to think for themselves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Extreme right-wingers are known for giving God a bad name; extreme left-wingers are known for giving God a weak name. He's not as simple as conservative versus liberal, old versus new. His wings are balanced. God is both and neither.
Criss Jami
It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs
Malaclypse the Younger
Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton
If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.
Thomas Paine
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Blaise Pascal
A dog knows and respects his master; men respect their masters only under duress, envy them and plot their downfall.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Only dogs know and respect their masters. This is a rare characteristic of men who secretly envy their masters and wish their downfall.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
Confucius
If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleve
Elbert Hubbard
We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
G.K. Chesterton
As I have said before, I had no illusions about my performing ability. But I did not know that my despair was brought about not because I had no talent but because I did not know how to develop it.
Shinichi Suzuki
They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor. (Eric Hoffer 1902-1983)
Eric Hoffer
Being rich is an untalented artist’s consolation prize.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The good will is all — and all the talents are ways to fulfill it.
Abraham Isaac Kook
Common people are merely intent on spending time - whoever has some talent, on making use of it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don't you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it? Such was the high opinion it had of its talents.
Zhuangzi
Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
Ayn Rand