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Quotes by Philosopher
"Love is black. Love is white. Love is brown. Love is humanity."
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"Believe in yourself, not in your critics."
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"Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal."
16
"The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction."
16
"Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use."
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"Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil."
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"It is easier to fall off of a ladder than to climb one."
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"We pass through Time from birth in order to have from where to come, together with death."
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"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths."
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"You may judge others only according to your knowledge of yourself."
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"No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity."
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"For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil."
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"As the sun hides behind clouds, success hides behind trouble."
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"If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future."
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"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
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"When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised."
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"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
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"When the reality is no different than a beautiful dream, stick tightly to that reality!"
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"Your brightest light will take you to your greatest heights."
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"The voice of beauty speaks softly, it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls."
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"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."
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"Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives."
16
"Is there anyone that knows the absolute truth?"
16
"Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse."
16
"We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves."
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"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
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"The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know - for comedians are the caricatures among us."
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"Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse."
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"Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party."
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"He who lives in the present lives in eternity."
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"Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men."
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"An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity."
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"If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world."
16
"The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that "the good exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse."
16
"There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen."
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"The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem."
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"Money makes the world go round, but love makes the universe go in every direction."
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"Love is the only tyrant whose reign is sweet."
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"I loved him not, yet I did not hate Him. I listened to Him not to hear His words but rather he sound of His voice; for His voice pleased me. All that He said was vague to my mind, but the music thereof was clear to my ear. Indeed were it not for what others have said to me of His teaching, I should not have known even so much as whether He was with Judea or against it."
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"We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike."
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"Diamonds are proof that the most valuable things are sometimes formed in the dark."
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