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Quotes by Philosopher
"Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge."
18
"O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!"
18
"The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors."
18
"To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light."
18
"If we wish to wrest an advantage from the enemy, we must not fix our minds on that alone, but allow for the possibility of the enemy also doing some harm to us, and let this enter as a factor into our calculations."
18
"Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it."
18
"Any belief which encourages you to use your own intellect, which motivates you to question everything and points out your own mind as the only road for your salvation is a good belief!"
18
"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."
18
"Jealousy stings, envy poisons, anger harms, and hate murders."
18
"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses."
18
"Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself."
18
"If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward."
18
"But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented."
18
"To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher."
18
"I am one thing, my writings are another."
18
"When the best leader's work is done the people say, "We did it ourselves.""
18
"The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile."
18
"Strangers are endearing because you don't know them yet."
18
"Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience."
18
"How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive."
18
"It is not enough to call yourself a 'free thinker' just because you can change your beliefs. A whole mess of people change their beliefs based on what is fashionable rather than what is factual, which, by always following the crowd, would be the complete opposite of the beauty of a free thinker."
18
"In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone."
18
"All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word."
18
"Speech is silvern silence is golden."
18
"Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there."
18
"It is only safe to mock a crocodile when you have crossed the river."
18
"Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you."
18
"I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism."
18
"It is wisdom to believe the heart."
18
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
18
"Don't seek security; seek adventure. It is uncertainty that makes life worth living."
18
"What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?"
18
"These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life."
18
"To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem."
18
"Klar sieht, wer von ferne sieht, nebelhaft, wer Anteil nimmt."
18
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
18
"Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself."
18
"It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude."
18
"More than half of my life is past, I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues."
18
"Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice."
18
"Imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, that is, they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands, they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples."
18
"... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance."
18
"Absolute equals nothingness."
18
"Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title."
18
"There is more to joy than looking only for affirmation, refusing to be challenged is the only bigotry."
18
"Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue."
18
"Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds."
18
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