Philosophy Quotes - Page 229

Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.

Ayn Rand

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand

They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.

Stephen R. Covey

We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.

Joseph Bruchac

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

Susan Neiman

Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.

John Myers Myers

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

William James

The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.

Blaise Pascal

People do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.

Heraclitus

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

Fulton J. Sheen

We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.

Rollo May

If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself

A.S. Neill

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.

Chuck Palahniuk

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

Augustine of Hippo

Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Louis de Bernières

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

Jaron Lanier

In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)

J.M. Coetzee

We love ourselves notwithstanding our faults, and we ought to love our friends in like manner.

Cyrus the Great

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

Frank Herbert

[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

Daniel Quinn

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

Peter Kreeft

If the sum of living be love's fee,Tremble. You are my one eternity.

Laura Benet

It is culture that is the bully."

Sharon Lee

If you cannot find an element of Humour in something, your not taking it seriously enough.

Ilyas Kassam

The awful thing is that if i can forget they're people, it will be no different at all

Suzanne Collins

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

Daniel Quinn

Life: It is better not to wrap philosophy around such an inconceivable evolving beautiful mystery. If based on perception, alone; whatever the conclusion - it is still guessing.

T.F. Hodge

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few

Shunryu Suzuki

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

Graham Greene

You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong.

Suzy Kassem

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Voltaire

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

John Dewey

Raise a smile and lower stress

Benny Bellamacina

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.

Peter Kreeft

The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!.

David Mitchell

When you've had one call after another and your little one is tugging on your shirt, remember what really matters. When the milk is splattered all over the floor and those little eyes are looking at you for your reaction, remember what really matters. It takes 5 minutes to clean up spilled milk; it takes much longer to clean up a broken spirit.

Rebecca Eanes

You have to be an artist and a madman...

Vladimir Nabokov

A sister is a dearest friend, a closest enemy, and an angel at the time of need.

Debasish Mridha

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

Dejan Stojanovic

Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.

Epictetus

But time given to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for all that we waste we shall be accountable.

Penelope Fitzgerald

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.

Mary Midgley

By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.

Peter Kreeft

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

Norman Maclean

My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point and to try to force it it's not really forgiveness. It's Buddhist philosophy or something spiritual jargon that you're trying to live up to but you're just using it against yourself as a reason why you're not okay.

Pema Chödrön

Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.

Jim Butcher

I realized that conservatism was the philosophy that best suited me, with its emphasis on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and merit.

Mark R. Levin

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.

Emmanuel Levinas

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

Ayn Rand

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

Albert Camus

...convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain.

Aesop

Philosophy is not a spectator sport.

Nigel Warburton

The world was floods above and fire below

Gregory Maguire

Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.

Søren Kierkegaard

If your leg is in a cast, it's really dumb to sit in front of your computer doing unnecessary stuff with it hanging down. Your leg will swell and heal slower, if at all. When you go to your doctor, he/she will give you one of those "you're really dumb and self destructive" looks. Also, "Why didn't you follow my orders and rest?" Your doctor will be right, and so will mine at my next office visit. Elevate, folk! Elevate your mind, your soul, and your leg, in the order needed!

Sandy Nathan

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

Criss Jami

Live like a tree, giving, forgiving and free.

Debasish Mridha

Language disguises thought.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is more Important to be of pure intention than of perfect action.

Ilyas Kassam

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Philosophy Quotes - Page 229

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