Philosophical Quotes - Page 5

The psychological effects of the sun are strange: it had not yet appeared over the horizon and we already felt comforted, just imagining the heat it would bring.

Ernesto Che Guevara

The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home.

Ray Bradbury

What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract him.If you follow the ways of the world, your heart will be drawn to its sensual defilements and easily led astray; if you go among people, your words will be guided by others' responses rather than come from your heart. There is nothing firm or stable in a life spent between larking about together and quarreling exuberant one moment, aggrieved and resentful the next. You are forever pondering pros and cons, endlessly absorbed in questions of gain and loss. And on top of delusion comes drunkenness, and in that drunkenness you dream.

Yoshida Kenkō

Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space.

Arthur Koestler

Good apprentices know that they are in the process of becoming masters and that as responsible artisans they must seek to improve upon the knowledge entrusted to them and go further.

William Coperthwaite

One species on the planet, and one species only, has reached the point of being able to have an impact on the evolutionary fortunes of all other species and upon the functioning of all ecosystems. We also have, in a way that is not true for any other species, a relationship to the planet as a whole and to the future. We live with all life.

Walter Truett Anderson

It's fine to have a dream girl, but you should ask yourself…would you be her dream boy?

R.M. ArceJaeger

Only people are worth dying for.

R.M. ArceJaeger

Life is like a box of cookies: it's good while it lasts, but before you know it, it's gone.

R.M. ArceJaeger

It's best to locate the mind first before launching the 'missiles of contention'.

Gasmaskman

Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library -- or school -- and resume life.(as said by Mrs. Pearson)

Adam Gopnik

When we merely follow another, we take a potentially creative mind out of service-our own.

William Coperthwaite

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it

Albert Camus

Only by knowing yourself can you live honestly and find your own path.

Gregory Bassham

.....we find ourselves inhabitants of the last few living cells of a dying god

Billy Kazee

So many things become beautiful when you really look

Lauren Oliver

Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well.

Richard Llewellyn

we live our lives from the "inside", from the vantage point of our own personal mini-cam on life. This gives us privileged access to what's going on inside our own heads. But sometimes we can be too close to ourselves to see us as we truly are. We lack perspective, objectivity. That's where friends can help. Friends can tell you when you're selfish or rude or making a total fool of yourself. Conversely, they can let you know when you're being kind or generous or need to lighten up on yourself.

Gregory Bassham

It's in out-of-the-ordinary situations - especially situations of challenge or adversity - that the most important differences between people shine through.

Gregory Bassham

If we forget the past, individually or as a culture, we lose knowledge that has already been gained, and we lose valuable tools by which our knowledge may grow.

S. Joel Garver

we live best when we live for a cause greater than ourselves

Michael W. Austin

Truly, the old maid is a most useful person, one of the reserve forces of the community. They talk of the superfluous woman, but what would the poor superfluous man do without her kindly presence?

Arthur Conan Doyle

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.

Robin Hobb

Are you dying?"Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.

Jo Nesbø

Well, it is in fact possible to put things behind you, Rakel. The art of dealing with ghosts is to dare to look at them long and hard until you know that is what they are. Ghosts. Lifeless, powerless ghosts.

Jo Nesbø

You have the ability to find all the answers--if you let yourself do so.

Heather Graham

Evil is done by the living.

Heather Graham

Evil doesn't just go away.

Heather Graham

It meant leading my meta-life. Meta-life is the opposite of living in the moment. It 's the syndrome of simultaneously having an experience and being an observer commenting on and questioning the experience. By observing something, you change it, sometimes for the better, but in my experience, usually for the worse. You know you re in the meta-life when you 're critiquing an experience while you 're having it ( This is fun but it would be more fun if . . . ), trying to talk yourself into happiness because you should feel it ( It 's a beautiful day, and all I really need to be happy are fresh air and sunshine ), or worrying that you re not getting any closer to the "Big Important Things" ( Sure, this is a great date, but what are the odds this guy would ever marry someone like me? ).

Holly Shumas

A book without conversation, is like a life without friends, you know it's going to end, but you want it to be soon.

Ken Balneaves

If he ever changes his stance on something, it's because he's received new information.

Heather Graham

Some people remember the sixties better than others do. Some weren't even there, some who were there were not really there, and some who were not really there were "really there".

Tom Hays

That's a stupid question,' said Malachi. 'Because he didn't warn him. He didn't warn anyone.''No, it's a philosophical question,' Kearns corrected him. 'Which makes it useless, not stupid.

Rick Yancey

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

Quentin Crisp

If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a correspondence bewteen the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.

Vitruvius

Nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour no, even as these trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temples self, so does the moon, the passion posey, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls and bound to us so fast, that wheather there be shine, or gloom o'er cast, They always must be with us, or we die.

John Keats

Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.

Armando Valladares

What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

Virginia Woolf

Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.

G.K. Chesterton

Irony is the kid who steals music and is stolen by the music.

MEDVGNO

Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.

Amin Maalouf

Heated is what you get when you rub faith and instinct together.

Cornelia "Connie" DeDona

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them-just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.

Ayn Rand

I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level.

Morag Joss

The only working model of socialism I have ever seen is in an elementary school classroom.

R.M. ArceJaeger

Luck is often just skill expressing itself without the brain’s consent.

R.M. ArceJaeger

Must this with farce and folly rack myhead unpunish'd ? that with sing-song,Whine me dead?

Juvenal

At the moment you think all is lost, the future remains.

R.M. ArceJaeger

Sometimes changing the world is as simple as changing the way you look at it.

R.M. ArceJaeger

We go to school so that when we grow up we can make lots of money, and we make lots of money so we can provide for our children, and we have children to provide for our retirement (because we don’t have any money left).

R.M. ArceJaeger

Devils so work that things which are not, appear to men as if they were real.

Lactantius

I suppose belief is there to prevent people from thinking.

Gasmaskman

Dreams are doorways into other dimensions that you forget how to open once you’re awake.

R.M. ArceJaeger

… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)

Richard McSweeney

Without the quest, there can be no epiphany.

Constantine E. Scaros

There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness

Sophocles

Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.

Patrick O'Brian

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986

Anthony Burgess

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Philosophical Quotes - Page 5

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