Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.
What we have done, the result of that comes to us whenever it comes, either today, tomorrow, hundred years later, hundred lives later, whatever, whatever. And so, it’s our own karma. That is why that philosophy in every religion: Killing is sin. Killing is sin in every religion.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
I always give RZA that support as far as saying he brought Wu-Tang to the table. It was his philosophy. He picked certain dudes to be part of this group, and he said, ‘This is what it’s going to be called.’
Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
Your mind is like this water, my friend. When it is agitated, it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.
History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”–from Past Present and Future are One
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
Art teaches you the philosophy of life, and if you can’t learn it from art, you can’t learn it at all. It shows you that there is no perfection. There is light, and there is shadow. Everything is in half tint.
The most important thing I gained from my travels was the knowledge that one could achieve anything with determination and an ounce of luck.
What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
I think that’s a weak excuse, to say because a rapper’s getting older that he ain’t got it no more. Nah. Don’t go by that philosophy. Let’s just recognize that talent is within.
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
He who is more mindful of one, loses the love and the faith of both.
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
There were a group of people before the Ascension known as the Astalsi. They claimed that each person was born with a certain finite amount of ill luck. And so, when an unfortunate event happened, they thought themselves blessed—thereafter, their lives could only get better.
Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers.
Particularity leads to peculiarity and then to pathological behavior. The three Ps. It is very insidious. You would eventually end up in a box. If you try to control your environment, it will control you. And everyone else around you will always have to be making adjustments to your maddening idiosyncracies…You are beginning to enslave yourself with your fussiness.
We…sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn’t good enough.
Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,
Wisdom is being able to see the world for what it is, rather than what you want it to be.
The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one’s own path, not that of the crowd.
There are only two most powerful situations- being so small that you have nothing to lose and being so big that you don’t care what you lose!
When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
I would like to try harder to establish my thought and philosophy strongly and to go back to the universe with my love.
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Anyway—because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.
Mereka yang memimpin selalu lupa ketika dipimpin, seperti kupu-kupu dengan kepompong, lupa bahkan pada ulat sebagai asalnya.
By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.
The philosophy of FIFA is to expand world soccer space, to spread out the world football space.
For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.
Whatever I learned,Whatever I knew,Seems like those faded years of childhood that flew,Away in some dilemma,Always in some confusion,The purpose of this life,Seems like an illusion!
Apocalypse is a frame of mind. [Nicodemus] said then. A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.
It is not what we have that matters; what matters is what we give away with love.
All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.
Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
It’s important to celebrate the monogram. It’s the DNA of Vuitton. I think – I hope – there is an interest in the philosophy and culture of the Vuitton name. It’s quite coherent and intellectual, and the products are great. These are things you will want to pass on – things you treasure.
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.
I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today’s peak experiences.
…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
Existential philosophy, poetry and art – just like sadness – were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to patch up our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.
Part of the philosophy of ‘The Dice Man’ is that you have got to be laughing at yourself at every moment and be free of yourself at every moment.
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
Wir werden alt und grau. Wir werden eines Tages verschlissen sein und aus der Welt verschwinden. Mit unseren Träumen ist das anders. Sie können in anderen Menschen weiterleben, wenn es uns schon längst, längst nicht mehr gibt.
I need to talk about Chinese culture. We have deep, strong philosophy and culture. I want to share some information, tell the worldwide audience.