Quotes by Philosophers - Page 94

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Socrates
The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to be confronted with a huge campaign for the conversion of heretics, while Francis had only the more subtle task of the conversion of human beings.
G.K. Chesterton
Imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, that is, they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands, they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples.
Immanuel Kant
At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.The matter had to be tested — on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ...-- Eric McLuhan, introduction
Marshall McLuhan
I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.Actively relating to the Church's prayer and sacraments is not done through ideas. Any Catholic today who has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church: that's meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.
Marshall McLuhan
So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.
Cornelius Van Til
But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
In short, you had that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Death actually never kills you, time does
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A man’s bank balance is the new penis size.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won't hail the occasion with delight.
Marcus Aurelius
All terrible things are more terrible if they give us no chance of retrieving a blunder—either no chance at all, or only one that depends on our enemies and not ourselves. Those things are also worse which we cannot, or cannot easily, help. Speaking generally, anything causes us to feel fear that when it happens to, or threatens, others causes us to feel pity.
Aristotle
We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
Aldous Huxley
– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.
Albert Schweitzer
Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.
Plato
Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism
Max Scheler
It is peculiar to “ressentiment criticism” that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.
Max Scheler
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
Susan Sontag
The pleasure of criticism takes away from us the pleasure of being deeply moved by very fine things.
Jean de La Bruyère
In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.
Voltaire
A cowardly critique starts with a compliment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I will only start taking book reviews seriously from the day that books are able to review readers.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not everybody that says that you suck is a hater. There are people who suck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Procrastination threatens critics’ livelihood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Critiquing a doer isn’t doing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man’s mind is hidden in his writings: criticism brings it to light.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.
Aldous Huxley
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
Susan Sontag
As uncomfortable as it might be, I refuse to let the comfort of being agreed with suffocate my opinions.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An insincere critic of a sincere person never wins.
Criss Jami
There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.
Aristotle
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.
Michel de Montaigne
In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.
John Ralston Saul
Criticism is something you can easily avoid — by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
Aristotle
A great truth wants to be criticized not idolized
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
Rebecca Goldstein
All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
Neither the student nor I would mind in the least fair criticism and correction, but no one will permit himself to suffer criticism and correction from another whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is less than the one criticized and corrected; whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is susceptible to doubt as to its true worth and validity.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
I don't criticise the free choice of others, and I ask others do the same to me
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
Aristotle
At that shameful stage in the development of our criticism, literary abuse would overstep all limits of decorum; literature itself was a totally extraneous matter in critical articles: they were pure invective, a vulgar battle of vulgar jokes, double-entendres, the most vicious calumnies and offensive constructions. It goes without saying, that in this inglorious battle, the only winners were those who had nothing to lose as far as their good name was concerned. My friends and I were totally deluded. We imagined ourselves engaged in the subtle philosophical disputes of the portico or the academy, or at least the drawing room. In actual fact we were slumming it.
Vladimir Odoyevsky
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
George Steiner
...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
Karl Marx
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
Susan Sontag
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Karl Marx
The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
Nikos Kazantzakis
All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.
Amos Bronson Alcott
Live a life of friction. Let yourself be disturbed as much as possible, but observe.
G.I. Gurdjieff
What is the purpose? Do no ask. No one knows, not even God, as He advances along with us, He too, searching and being exposed to danger; He too is given a struggle. Hunger and injustice exist in the heart, as does abundance of darkness. The things you see are not specters; no matter how much blow, they will not be dispelled. They are flesh and bone. Touch them; they exist. Don't you hear a cry in the air? They are crying. What are they crying? Help! To whom they are crying? You! You: every man. Rise up. Our duty is not to ask questions, but to clasp hands one and all and mount the ascent. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.
Otto Rank
Conflict is the essence of the self.
J.Krishnamurti
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke
The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus.
Franz Joseph Gall