Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Philosophers - Page 5

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.

Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards.

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

I cannot know anything of which there is and can be only one.

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.

Humility is attentive patience.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

The less men think, the more they talk.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

It is by doubting that we come to investigate, and by investigating that we recognize the truth.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The harder the struggle, the more glorious the triumph. Self-realization demands very great struggle.

Listen to the inner light; it will guide you. Listen to inner peace; it will feed you. Listen to inner love; it will transform you, it will divinise you, it will immortalise you.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.

I see, indeed I know, that in some sense God is love, and God is wisdom, and God is creative action, yes and God is beauty; but what God actually is, whether the maker of all things, or the fragrance of all things, or just a dream in our own hearts, I have not the art to know. Neither have you, I believe; nor any man, nor any spirit of our humble stature.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Genius is nothing but continued attention.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.

Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate, beyond the reach of, all political powers.

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Ridicule, which chiefly arises from pride, a selfish passion, is but at best a gross pleasure, too rough an entertainment for those who are highly polished and refined.

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role!

The point is this: If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Feeling bad is not a requirement; it’s something we agree to. Cut it loose!