Philosopher Quotes

The human community and individual people are more likely to hurt or undernourish children they think of as 'bodies' to be used. Cultures and people are more likely to raise children to be mere economic interns rather than fully developed humans if they see children as 'bodies' to be forced into certain economic and social molds.

Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered as bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other.

I am so far from thinking the maxims of Confucius and Jesus Christ to differ, that I think the plain and simple maxims of the former, will help to illustrate the more obscure ones of the latter, accommodated to the then way of speaking.

The deep satisfaction found in scientific work, akin to the delight derived from genuine art, is one of the fundamental human emotions which is highly intensified by personal contact with the creative mind.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons.

Alain de Benoist

Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry.

Pittacus of Mytilene

A good man never wholly perishes, the best part of his being outlives in eternity.

Listen, then. I say justice is nothing other than what is advantageous for the stronger.

Man is the work of nature: he exists in nature: he is submitted to her laws: he cannot deliver himself from them: nor step beyond them, even in thought.

Baron d'Holbach

Slovenliness is a lazy and beastly negligence of a man's own person, whereby he becomes so sordid as to be offensive to those about him.

As you discover your daily good, and believe in it, and think about it, expect it to continue.

What was always was, and always shall be. For, if it came into being, necessarily, before its generation, there was nothing; so, if there were nothing, nothing at all would come from nothing.

Melissus of Samos

For Kant, the predisposition to good (like Calvin's 'seed of goodness') is in one way more fundamental to us than the overlying propensity to evil, and in one way it is less fundamental. The predisposition to good is more fundamental because it is essential to us; we cannot lose it without ceasing to be human. The propensity to evil is in that way less fundamental, because we can lose it, and indeed we should lose it, without ceasing to be human. On the other hand, the propensity to evil is in a different way more fundamental. It is our root maxim when we are born.

Be sure that religion cannot be right that a man is the worse for having.

Best of feasts is the essence of the Supreme
Brahman, Nothing to beg when you have tasted it.
Vanishes the distinction of renouncer, renunciation and renounced.
And you become the monarch of the universe - Mankuthimma.

The modern scientific worldview with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a "flipside," a complementary set of views which it generates as its train. And this is its misology, sophistry, its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. There is thus a quite literal type of schizophrenia in the world bequeathed to us by the Cartesians. It is, on the one hand, hyper-rational; it seeks to extend the purview of mathematical physics throughout the universe. On the other hand, it relegates the world in which the physicist himself dwells, the unique world of humanity and its communities, to the junkpile of the irrational. We who know so much are prohibited from knowing ourselves.

We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.

According to Luther everyone judges everyone. This is because there's an intense desire to be judging. Then those of us on the masochistic side of things want to be judged. Thus we publish. We teach. We learn. We beg to be judged and decimated.

Remote fountains are of little help to nearby fires.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.

Jacob Needleman

The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver.

Riches are a cause of evil, not because, of themselves, they do any evil, but because they goad men on so that they are ready to do evil.

The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.