Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Philosophers - Page 7

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.'

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.

When you meet dishonest people, move them with sincerity. When you meet violent people, affect them with gentility. When you meet warped people, inspire them with justice. Then the whole world enters your forge.

If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

You have been taught that there is something wrong with you and that you are imperfect, but there isn't and you're not.

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.

Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

All genuine philosophy transcends national boundaries. Patriotic philosophies are just nationalist ideologies.

When it seems humanly impossible to do more in a difficult situation, surrender yourself to the inner silence and thereafter wait for a sign of obvious guidance or for a renewal of inner strength.

I think it's ok to have wishes that conflict with each other - it's irrational to try to make them both come true, but not irrational simply to have them.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

It's clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.

Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.

Humanity is fortunate, because no man is unhappy except by his own fault.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

Moral virtues and intellectual virtues are very different from each other, and moral virtue has to do with motivation, not cognition. Moral virtue requires a human level of intelligence, but it doesn't require that one be an intelligent human.

The learned should be vigorous and diligent, but they should also be free-spirited. If they are too rigorous and austere, they have the death-dealing quality of autumn but lack the life-giving quality of spring. How can they develop people then?

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.

Each human being, however small or weak, has something to bring to humanity. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other's stories, things begin to change. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgment and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart.

Solitude is the place of purification.

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.

God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Men create the gods in their own image.

There is but One God. His name is Truth; He is the Creator. He fears none; he is without hate. He never dies; He is beyond the cycle of births and death. He is self-illuminated. He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru. He was True in the beginning; He was True when the ages commenced and has ever been True. He is also True now.

It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen at all.

ALL things in Nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing. They fulfil their functions and make no claim.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

The process of inner self-examination brings about a knowledge that is as rigorous and supported by evidence as anything science has to offer. At the same time, this point of view redefines faith as a knowledge that is attained not only by intellectual means, but also through the rigorous development of the emotional side of the human psyche. Such emotional knowledge is unknown to the isolated intellect and has therefore been mistakenly labeled as "irrational."

Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enmity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Every single university student should study philosophy. You need to lead the examined life and question your beliefs. If you don't learn critical thinking, then political debate degenerates into a contest of slogans.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Life comes from the earth and life returns to the earth.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

... even when we find not what we seek, we find something as well worth seeking as what we missed.

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!