Best 15727 quotes in «philosophy quotes» category

Its only by educating the youth to challenge you that you remove the chains on their minds that you have placed there RjS

It's only when we dare to experience the full anxiety of knowing that life doesn't go on forever that we can experience transcendence and get in touch with the infinite. To use an analogy from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the necessary ground for the figure of Being to make itself known to us. It's only when we're willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls "the leap of faith." p. 43

Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness

It’s sad that most of our real life problems that affect us daily, don't make it as breaking news on facebook. They are not trending on twitter or not glamorous enough for instagram and those problems are the ones that take away our happiness. The problems that other people don't know about. The ones we fight alone everyday and every night.

It's sometimes impossible to change a religious person's mind. They have one answer for everything. It's like answering "x" for every math problem, and x stands for whatever it needs to in that moment.

It started raining and suddenly memories drenched my soul...

It’s time that Islam should be redefined by the world based upon, the goodness of all the peace-loving Muslims, instead of the theoretical teachings of some books, be it Quran or the Hadith.

It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.

It's Unfair to be fair, For Life is unfair

It's tough to get out of one's inherited imbecilic culture, and a thus inherited or endowed lunatic belief system. A freethinker must overcome every deadened system. Especially one's own.

It's very hard to dispel your ignorance, if you retain your arrogance.

It’s very important to understand why you do the things you do. Your understanding will make you work harder and be passionate, your lack of understanding will make you doubt and to give up on what you are doing.

It's treachery when one becomes God-body, spiritually inclined to the mind of a God-mentality. The ability of divinity is at the peak of a snowy mountain. Give ear to my words as this liquid flows through a golden fountain.

It’s when your plans look dead that God’s resurrection power begins to operate in your life in greater measure

It's with a heavy heart that I assure you that regardless of how lasting your fortune feels, it can be taken from you before you can even think to try to hold on.

It takes all of our life to learn how to live, and – something that may surprise you more – it takes just as long to learn how to die.

It’s your crap that’s endearing. It’s the basis of any relationship, way beyond even the choice of who wins on to whom. It’s crap that sustains things. The mutual vulnerability that comes from knowing each other’s crap. How shallow would we be if you only felt things for people on account of their successes? How likely would that be to survive?

It takes but a moment to fall in love; it takes a lifetime to forget it.

It takes only a strong One to change All.

It takes respect, understanding, and forgiveness to make peace.

It takes tremendous courage to be honest and true to yourself.

It takes tremendous courage, persistence, and perseverance to pursue your ultimate purpose.

It took me a long time to learn how to love myself. But I don't try to convince someone else to do the same!

It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an "illogical" world would look like.

It was a burden on all her muscles. A hollow deeper than her bones. She braced herself though, she knew why Atlas stood so tall.

It was all a leaving light. A thing that passed in the distance, that was never yours, this and that world; empty, devoid of reason, but you could still imagine it happy: before the dark wood, before you had entered this place. Where there was no other place to go but forward. Everything you despised you could still come to miss. A little view that resembles what you once knew. So you survived the flood, you survived the apocalypse, left as the last one kneeling but what now? You have seen stars collapse on themselves, drawing light from the dark. We are living with the lives we choose, however we exiled ourselves there and to which island. What is worth dying for, you say as the blade turns further into you. A bed to rest.

It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.

It was a slow fall, through warm experiences and good laughs. It didn't even feel like love until I got to the end. Even then, it was not the hard surface of rock, but the scorching embrace of more.

It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumours started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men – truly abominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough – but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had ‘beguiled many people through satanic wiles’. Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had ‘beguiled him through her magic’. This could not be allowed to continue. One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

It was if I made love to a nymph of the mountains or air or wind and she had come to me to make me fall in love and leave, with some grand plan behind those actions. The last time I saw her she was just looking anywhere but me, a magical siren who I was helpless to look at staring at her distant gaze. A side profile of one of the most beautiful things I would ever see, with her hair blowing through the fall Melbourne wind.

It was in Kuala Lumpur that I saw the tree roots at the botanical gardens grow as much outside of the ground as inside. I saw what used to be the tallest building in the world still appreciated for its beauty long after it lost its title. I thought people could be like buildings, still adored despite their best years behind them. I heard the horns of cars drown out the sound of fountains spurting illuminated shades of violet and crashing against themselves and I thought it was time to leave, to head home the same way I left it; expecting things to be a different way than how they actually will work out. The actions of ones life, makes his life, and in this way things can disappear but never leave. A person that sees beauty in only the grand has never witnessed true beauty, if the abyss is to remind us of anything it is that there is beauty in nothingness and everything. The forest that has no trees, no stones, no path and no flowers is still a forest because of the feeling one can get walking through it which leaves me wondering if the grand zero is everything, that reality was a moment in which I both existed and ceased to exist.

It was humanity's way of shrugging 'I don't know, what do you think?' Humanity also had a rather difficult time handling the answers to it's own question.

It was her eyes. Soft, meadow-shade eyes with frostbitten edges. Every glance casually held gossamer infinity. Every stare revealed inky black abyss with a hint of divinity.

It was necessary for man's salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason ... because man is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason: "The eye has not seen, O God...what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee" (Is 66:4). But the end must first be known by men who are to direct their ... actions to the end. Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths about God which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation. Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors. Whereas man's whole salvation, which is in God, depends upon the knowledge of this truth. Therefore, in order that the salvation of men might be brought about more fitly and more surely, it was necessary that they should be taught divine truths by divine revelation.

It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.

It was one thing to be fooled, and another thing to be taken for a fool all the time.

It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy - and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment; indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encounter at all.

It was the end for something. It was the beginning for another. But in reality it just fell in the middle. In that confusing moment of time between my birth and my death.

It was the first time I realized that I was going to die. I was drowning in the realization that this life was not going to last, that life was one day going to end, and as I began to suffocate in the fear of my own mortality, something happened, the days began to pass. I slowly began to forget in the constant flight of life the one thing that could set me free. My mind turned then to the first time I was in love. But was I really in love? For five whole years I had forgotten myself, my existence in the embrace of another. Love, the river Styx, and a toll we pay so we don’t wander wretchedly this earth in a lonely eternity, watching with remorse the fleeting happiness of others in union. Love, Narcissus, a stream where we fall in love not with another, but in the fact that the other loves us. Perhaps. Love, Fleeting fulfillment of which at the end lies Ceres, heads of a dog that will devour us and leave us stranded in the abyss with a thirst never quenched, but our throats always crying out, dry, for more and more and more. Ich liede Durst. So said Siddhartha. Immer. Toujours. Always And forever, ad infinitum. O Life thou pluckest me out. I guess it doesn’t matter though because, perhaps, that’s just life, and what is true is that for one eternal moment I was in joy…I was the blinking eye wide open which ever widened for more.

It will be said that, although God’s law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the Word of God, and it is no more permissible to say of Scripture that it is mutilated and contaminated than to say this of God’s Word. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God’s Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink.

It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore.

It will surprise you. It will keep you mute. it will make you ponder. It will ignite your passion. It will dumb fold you. It will invoke your joy. It will kick your pain away. It will shake your envy. It will shove your slothfulness.It will wake you up. It will turn your thought. It will inspire you. It will give you reasons. It will harness your potentials. It trigger your power.It will grease your body. It will electrify your nerves. It will make you giggle. It will shake your body. It will make you inquire and enquire.It will leave you in wonder. That is it!

I understand your actions more than your conversations.

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.

It will be seen how there can be the idea of a special science, the *critique of pure reason* as it may be called. For reason is the faculty which supplies the *principles* of *a priori* knowledge. Pure reason therefore is that which contains the principles of knowing something entirely *a priori*. An *organon* of pure reason would be the sum total of the principles by which all pure *a priori* knowledge can be acquired and actually established. Exhaustive application of such an organon would give us a system of pure reason. But as this would be a difficult task, and as at present it is still doubtful whether indeed an expansion of our knowledge is possible here at all, we may regard a science that merely judges pure reason, its sources and limits, as the *propaedeutic* to the system of pure reason. In general, it would have to be called only a *critique*, not a *doctrine* of pure reason. Its utility, in regard to speculation, would only be negative, for it would serve only to purge rather than to expand our reason, and, which after all is a considerable gain, would guard reason against errors. I call all knowledge *transcendental* which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible *a priori*. A system of such concepts would be called *transcendental philosophy*. But this is still, as a beginning, too great an undertaking. For since such a science must contain completely both analytic and synthetic *a priori* knowledge, it is, as far as our present purpose is concerned, much too comprehensive. We will be satisfied to carry the analysis only so far as is indispensably necessary in order to understand in their whole range the principles of *a priori* synthesis, with which alone we are concerned. This investigation, which properly speaking should be called only a transcendental critique but not a doctrine, is all we are dealing with at present. It is not meant to expand our knowledge but only to correct it, and to become the touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all *a priori* knowledge. Such a critique is therefore the preparation, as far as possible, for a new organon, or, if this should turn out not to be possible, for a canon at least, according to which, thereafter, the complete system of a philosophy of pure reason, whether it serve as an expansion or merely as a limitation of its knowledge, may be carried out both analytically and synthetically. That such a system is possible, indeed that it need not be so comprehensive as to cut us off from the hope of completing it, may already be gathered from the fact that it would have to deal not with the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but with the understanding which makes judgments about the nature of things, and with this understanding again only as far as its *a priori* knowledge is concerned. The supply of this *a priori* knowledge cannot be hidden from us, as we need not look for it outside the understanding, and we may suppose this supply to prove sufficiently small for us to record completely, judge as to its value or lack of value and appraise correctly. Still less ought we to expect here a critique of books and systems of pure reason, but only the critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only once we are in possession of this critique do we have a reliable touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of old and new works on this subject. Otherwise, an unqualified historian and judge does nothing but pass judgments upon the groundless assertions of others by means of his own, which are equally groundless.

I used to size people up to see whether they were a good advert for meditation. Then at some point it clicked that there wasn't a type of person they were going to become. They were each just more and more themselves. Jim was very Jim, Isaac was unique in his Isaac-ness and Debbie was increasingly Debbie. That was a great relief - that I could relax into being Tessa.

I've always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

I’ve known him so long that we are now but one and the same.

I've seen so many fools who think in their heart there's no God, but the fools that amaze me most are the ones who think they are God.