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Quotes by Philosopher


"All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew."


"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away."

"As inside of every seed is the power to rise from darkness, inside of everyone is the power to rise from adversity."

"Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: "Yourself, sir, replied the other, "by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life."

"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"You become strong by lifting others up, not pulling them down."

"Philosophy does not claim to secure for us anything outside our control. Otherwise it would be taking on matters that do not concern it. For as wood is the material of the carpenter, and marble that of the sculptor, so the subject matter of the art of life is the life of the self."

"Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience."

"It {romantic love} really isn't about two people who have fallen madly for each other, it's about two people seeing spirit in each other."

"If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were."

"There are three things that a beggar and a rich person share every day: the sun, the moon, and the stars."

"It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger."

"Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment."

"If you have a boat to sail, land becomes a choice! If you do not have a boat to sail, land becomes a fate! Create different choices so that you can have different fates!"

"There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened."


"If you look on wealth as a thing to be valued your imaginary poverty will cause you torment."


"One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward."

"I think that there are excellent and poor thinking habits just as there are healthy and unhealthy eating habits; and when a man really knows how to think, you cannot necessarily assert that he thinks too much in a strictly negative connotation. Perhaps this is in a sense food for thought, whereas the other is fool for thought."

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."


"Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire the other is to get it."


"The best ideas are common property."

"We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact."

"When love and awareness meet, a revolution happens."

"Space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new."

"There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later."

"How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself."

"When darkness comes, stars shine. When storms come, plants flourish. When adversity comes, champions triumph."

"It is never a river's fault that one cannot swim."

"I am not one who was born with great wisdom. I love the ancients and diligently seek wisdom among them."

"To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased."


"Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is."

"There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest."

"There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration."

"Talent silences your competition, genius deafens them."

"Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this."

"An introvert talks more than an extrovert because when the mouth is closed, the mind is opened."


"When your army has crossed the border, you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home."

"All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small."

"I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race-I am ashamed to belong to such a species."

"Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence."

"Exercise has a direct brain connection, when you consider what it actually does. What we tend to overlook are the feedback loops that connect the brain to every cell in the body. Therefore when you throw a ball, run on a treadmill, or jog along the shore, billions of cells are "seeing" the outside world. The chemicals transmitted form the brain are acting the way sense organs do, making contact with the outside world and offering stimulation from that world.This is why the jump from being sedentary to doing a minimal amount of exercise - such as walking, light gardening, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator - is so healthy. Your cells want to be part of the world."


"Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know."

"Everyday is a mystery."

"I AM IGNORANT of absolute truth. But I am humble before my ignorance and therein lies my honor and my reward."


"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."
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