For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
And the political system is changing rapidly in this country, and we better realize that. The elephants or donkeys are not what younger people look to. They look at individual candidates’ philosophy, and I think it’s a different time and a different generation.
No lake so still but it has its wave.No circle so perfect but that it has its blur.I would change things for you if I could; As I can’t you must take them as they are.
No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.
Religion? Mr Kumar grinned broadly. I don’t believe in religion. Religion is darkness.
Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.
The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.
What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
Each sunrise brings a new day filled with new hopes for a new beginning.
If you win, you need not have to explain…If you lose, you should not be there to explain!
But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can’t just assume that because something is old it is right.
Creativity sparks originality, which then manifests itself into what we call evolution. To depreciate imagination is to depreciate life.
It is a maxim in philosophy that ambitious men can be never good counselors to princes; the desire of having more is common to great lords, and a desire of rule a great cause of their ruin.
I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.
When you’ve tried everything and failed, try everything else and succeed
Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
Most often you don’t own your own mind; you borrow it from society.
I’ll follow you, even to death—but I won’t live with you any more.
If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva.
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
I consist of body and soul – in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn’t we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.
If one does not develop, one goes down. In life, in ordinary conditions everything goes down, or one capacity may develop at the expense of another.
Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
For me, Buddhism is a psychology and a philosophy that provides a means, upayas, for working with the mind.
If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Every now and then, President Obama sorta drops his veil. He’s less coy about his philosophy, he sort of reveals his true governing philosophy, what he really believes.
For the former, activity, any kind of activity, was an end in itself; for the latter, activity was but a progress toward the true end, which was rest, and peace of mind. Action was to be undertaken only when equilibrium was disturbed.
It’s good to see the snakes revealing themselves. They weren’t actually hidden at all. People hide behind the masks, but eventually you see them for who they truly are.
The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?
For over a century and a half, anarchists have been arguing that coercive, hierarchical organization (as embodied in government and corporations) is not equivalent to organization per se (which they regard as necessary), and that coercive organization should be replaced by decentralized, nonhierarchical organization based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. This is hardly a rejection of organization.
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.
What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes.
This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
Man’s naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.
It is more Important to be of pure intention than of perfect action.
It takes intelligence to recognize intelligence, or the lack of it.
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.
Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.
I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.
My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
You didn’t kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn’t kill him.So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn’t have time to sleep.