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Philosophy Quotes
"Life always involves some logic in its manifestations, and logic, as a rule, excludes the versatility of life from its considerations."
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"Blaming our past for not taking action to change our destiny for good is taken from a weak man's playbook..."
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"You can never know everything. Part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of knowledge lies in going on anyway."
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"He who let's the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation."
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"It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery, we build where monsters used to hide themselves."
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"The inability to rise above one's inherited ism and ideology makes one live and die a fool, just a folly."
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"We're shadows! of naught - living, dying! for what's not."
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"People are like the waves, all similar, none the same."
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"The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better."
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"The truth is not what I look for. It is what I look at!"
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"In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride-or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation-takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert-all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition."
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"Like a snake sheds its skin, we are capable of getting rid of assembled habits, creating space to call matters into question. Instead of the Shakespearian " To be or not to be " we could favor " to become or not to become". By "becoming", we challenge the range of possibilities in our life and go beyond the merely "being". We can retreat, then, from the imprisonment of a deadly routine, acquire an identity and develop our personality. ['Man without Qualities']"
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"Philosophers have often held disputeAs to the seat of thought in man and bruteFor that the power of thought attends the latterMy friend, thy beau, hath made a settled matter,And spite of dogmas current in all ages,One settled fact is better than ten sages. (O,Tempora! O,Mores!)"
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"The development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself."
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"I believe and therefore I am."
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"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."
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"Time ... is the life of the soul."
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"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."
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"It's kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith."
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"The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful he must obey his impulse."
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"Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure."
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"I clearly saw the skeleton underneathall this show of personalitywhat is left of a manand all his pride but bones?"
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"It is almost as if we are all playing a big game of hide-and-go-seek. We all hide expecting to be found, but no one has been labelled the seeker. We stand behind the wall, at first excited, then worried, then bored, then anxious, then angry. We hide and hide. After a while, the game is not fun anymore. Where is my seeker? Where is the person who is supposed to come find me here in my protected shell and cut me open? Where is that one who will make me trust him, make me comfortable, make me feel whole? Some people rot on the spot, waiting for the seeker that never comes. The most important truth that I can relate to you, if you are hiding and waiting, is that the seeker is you and the world, behind so many walls, awaits."
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"Control is an illusion, as is restraint. Dark to light, light to darkness."
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"No one was normal, not really."
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"I'm evolving, is the thing; I'm a god becoming a constellation.''The constellations are mostly demigods,' I point out. 'And they didn't get to be constellations until after they died.'He laughs at that, and says, 'Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal."
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"Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach."
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"Time that had not come yet-an anomaly in itself-had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change."
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"Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed."
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"Real life is to most men a long second best a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible."
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"Our reality is colored by our vibration and belief systems. In other words, the experiences we have in the world with other people are dictated by the energy we bring with us wherever we go."
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"I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" - a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared " most of all " to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe."
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"Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish."
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"People quick to criticize others, but won't shine the light on themselves. You can't always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how precious it is."
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"Some mysteries are meant to stay that way."
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"Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding."
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"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be."
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"Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad."
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"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve."
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"Where does fiction end and reality begin?"
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"Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it."
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"Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility."
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"God would never make man in his image,because that would then make him as vain as what man is."
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"It isn't death, pain, exile or anything else you care to mention that accounts for the way we act, only our opinion about death, pain and the rest."
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"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"
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"Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life."
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"Its a mathematical fact that two negatives make a positive so even under adverse circumstances think positively."
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"Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, "The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out;" as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide His works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game."
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