Quotes by Philosophers - Page 99

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If love wasn't conditional, everybody would be in love with everybody.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch
She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met...She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.
Ayn Rand
Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription, 'I too was created by eternal love'--at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise...the inscription 'I too was created by eternal hate'...
Friedrich Nietzsche
The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.
Jonathan Glover
When everyone hates a person, you should investigate thoroughly, and when everyone loves a person, you should also investigate thoroughly.
Confucius
Booty Butt, Booty Butt, Booty Butt Cheeks
René Descartes
Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Better to be a diamond in the rough, than a polished fake in denial.
T.F. Hodge
That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do.
Aldous Huxley
Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.
Blaise Pascal
How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Life's true face is the skull.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.
C. Terry Warner
Czech: Řekni mi, co čteš, a já ti řeknu, kdo jsi.English: Tell me what you read, and I'll tell you who you are.First president of Czechoslovakia.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
Nūllum magnum ingenium sine mixtūrā dēmentiae fuitNo great talent without an element of madness
Seneca
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
Jean-Paul Sartre
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.- Aristotle (Attributed by Seneca in Moral Essays, "De Tranquillitate Animi" On Tranquility of Mind, sct. 17, subsct. 10.)
Aristotle
They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.
Lev Shestov
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
Maurice Blanchot
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
Allen Ginsberg
Forgetting himself for a moment, Francis brought his hand out from under his frock in order to bless the multitude. When the people saw his wound they bellowed madly. The women dashed forward with mantles outstretched to catch the drops; the men thrust in their hands and anointed their faces with blood. The villagers' expressions grew savage, and so did their souls. They longed to be able to tear the Saint limb from limb in order for each of them to claim a mouthful of his flesh, for they wanted to make him their own, to have him enter them so that they could become one with a saint—could be sanctified. Blind rage had overpowered them; their eyes were leaden, their lips ringed with froth.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others.
Seneca
All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .
Emil M. Cioran
Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.
Michel Foucault
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
G.K. Chesterton
Creators almost always go mad.
Osho
The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.
Michel Foucault
You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
G.K. Chesterton
There nearly always is a method in madness.
G.K. Chesterton
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
Aristotle
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
George Santayana
Give me one manfrom among ten thousandif he is the best
Heraclitus
Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.
Adam Smith
... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process.
David Kelley
This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.
Peter Sloterdijk
Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain gray suit; the contrast between its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant—and strangely elegant.She let the finger tips of one hand rest on the railing, a narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar. Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.
Ayn Rand
...Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who’s painted a magnificent canvas—and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?”“What do you want? Perfection?”“—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.
Ayn Rand
His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
Ayn Rand
There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.
Robert M. Pirsig
They succeed not because they are perfect but because they do not let their imperfections stand in their way to success.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope.
Simone Weil
If we would aim at perfection in any thing, simplicity must not be overlooked.
Henry David Thoreau
I wonder whether the Christmas feeling has anything to do with the sixth sense. Perhaps we're a little more the angels at Christmas than we are during the rest of the year. And Christmas is about all the other senses. I can smell Christmas, I can taste Christmas, and I can see and hear it.
Jostein Gaarder
All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.
G.K. Chesterton
It's always funny that you can try and try again to steal all your critics' ammo, predict their responses, but no matter what, they'll still have a water gun stashed somewhere.
Criss Jami
Equality before the enemy -that is the main condition to fight a fair duel. Where you have contempt, you cannot wage war; where you are in command, where you can see someone beneath you, you should not wage war.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is important is not to fight, but to fight the right enemy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Gradually, I began to understand that it does not matter very much what problem, whether big or small, is tormenting us; the only thing that matters is that we be tormented. In other words, that we exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.
Baltasar Gracián
One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-- blessing it rather than in love with it.
Friedrich Nietzsche