Quotes

Post quotes by your favorite philosophers here.

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Socrates

—Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.??

—Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.??

—When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.??


?? Alan W. Watts

—People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.??

—It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.??

—Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.??

—The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.??

—A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.??

—Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this—

- Soren Kierkegaard.

"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."

—If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.??

—You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other??s imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.??

—But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn eveningin 1922." And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning... And the story goes on in reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: "It was night, the street was deserted." The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves be caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently appreciate. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.??

- Jean-Paul Sartre

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate." — Rainer Maria Rilke

"Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions, but actually the opposite is true. The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness." - Adyashanti

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement." - Aldous Huxley

"Softness is not weakness. It takes courage to stay delicate in a world this cruel." - Beau Taplin

"Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again." - Ana??s Nin

"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience." - Howard Zinn

"Nothing is never nothing. It is always something." - Cecelia Ahern

"We are all unreliable narrators, not just in the way we tell our stories to others, but how we tell them to ourselves." - Deb Caletti

"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth??s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to." - Leonard Peltier

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinitive hope." - Francis Scott Fitzgerald

"We have a tendency to want the other person to be finished product while we give ourselves the grace to evolve." - T. D. Jakes

"Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors." — Andrew Boyd

"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning." - Claude Bernard

"If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure — because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society — then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness."

"We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present. "

"Here is a list of fearful things:
The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings,
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before.
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days."

"Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that: though as the narrator??s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
It must be arbitrary then, the place at which we chose to embark.
Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed. "

"He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end were most of his tribe: it didn't mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing."

—It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course -- thousands in fact -- but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted.??

—Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.??

—Of course it's the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they??re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.??

—Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't jut Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love and widows; tales to tell children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing.??

—If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.??

—I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.??

—Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.??

—We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.??

—And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.??



Gaston Bachelard - Poetics of Space



(I hope I'll meet him in my dreams 🙂 )

The faculty of imagination is the source of all creativeness....without it there can be no works of art, no scientific or technical discoveries, no plan for ordering the economic or political life of nations.

Nikolay Berdyayev

Lack of imagination keeps people from existing

Hannah Arendt

1) Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing & your attitude when you have everything - Imam Ali (A.S)

2) Detachment is not that you should own nothing. But that nothing should own you. - Imam Ali (A.S)

3) Be soft without being weak. Be strong without be violent. - Imam Ali (A.S)

4) How strange and foolish is man. He loses his health in gaining wealth, and then, to regain his health he wastes his wealth. He ruins his present worrying about his future, but weeps in the future by reminiscing about his past. He lives as though death shall never come to him, but dies in a way as if he was never born - Imam Ali (A.S)

Love Imam Ali

Posted by DwellingOnMove
Look, this happens when people come and go. We lose their posts.

I wish they would remain under "Guest" even when they delete. Just keep the posts.

Posted by Nemilicious
You created this dungeon for me 9 months ago, admit it, satanmad!

😄

Posted by DwellingOnMove

Posted by Nemilicious
You created this dungeon for me 9 months ago, admit it, satanmad!

she's full of testosterone these days.

click to expand

Moi?

Surely you jest. lol.

This fragile Virgo?

Posted by DwellingOnMove
also so sorry that I poluted your thread with pubertal quarrels.

lol, no worries.

Posted by Damnata
Post quotes by your favorite philosophers here.

Does one I wrote myself count?

like a good neighbor, state farm is there

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

”• T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Søren Kierkegaard has to be the most mispronounced name in the history of modern philosophy.

Sometimes there is no next time, no second chance, no time out. Sometimes it's now or never.

What a terrible waste of a life it is, to always take the easy path, to never know what it is to risk everything for what you love.
Understanding is much deeper than knowledge.There are many people that know us,but very few who understand us.
I never knew how strong i was until i had to forgive someone who wasn't sorry , and accept an apology i never received.
I think people are most beauftul,when they aren't trying to be.When you catch them daydreaming,giggling,dancing,sleeping.When the light reflects perfectly off their face,giving them a heavenly glow.When you catch them doing a silly little dance whilist cooking up dinner.When they are lying in bed,tangled in sheets,sleeping.Not having a single bad thought cross their precious mind 🙂

milf hunter is doing a chick, and her husband calls

milf:"sorry honey, theres been a delay at the airport"

milf hunter: "a 7 inch delay

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

There is only a finger's difference between a wise man and a fool.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

He has the most who is most content with the least.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Diogenes

"It is not worth the bother to kill yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." Emil Cioran