Heraclides Philosopher Quotes

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, 'of Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. ~ Richard Rorty

In some universes, all possible pasts funnel towards a single fixed ending, Ω.

It you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon, If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable. ~ Yoon Ha Lee

To Lovers out there …

Settling down is not retirement. Fooling around is not an achievement. You settle down, because you found the right partner. You fool around, because you are looking for a right partner. ~ De_philosopher_DJKyos

I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I'm primarily a playboy philosopher. ~ Hugh Hefner

To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher. ~ Lin Yutang

There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets. ~ Wilferd Peterson

Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers. ~ Plato

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing special about having a wife,
but there is in how you govern a marriage.
There is nothing special about having a house,
but there is in how you govern a home.
There is nothing special about having a family,
but there is in how you govern a household.
There is nothing special about having a job,
but there is in how you govern your career.

There is nothing special about having degrees,
but there is in how you govern your life.
There is nothing special about having titles,
but there is in how you govern your duties.
There is nothing special about having friends,
but there is in how you govern your relationships.
There is nothing special about having medals,
but there is in how you govern your talents.

There is nothing special about having money,
but there is in how you govern your wealth.
There is nothing special about having power,
but there is in how you govern your responsibilities.
There is nothing special about having influence,
but there is in how you govern your authority.
There is nothing special about having property,
but there is in how you govern your possessions. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every time you use the Dragonflame philosophy, you refine your subtle body and stengthen your will by going through the process of separating the dross from the subtle and putting it back together again. Every time you follow this magical philosophy, you are doing what is know as the Great Work. In other words, every time you work magic using Dragonflame, you get closer to finding the Philosopher's Stone. ~ Lawren Leo

I am by turns a petulant adolescent and a mature man, a melancholy loner and a wit telling actors their trade. I cannot decide whether I'm a philosopher or a moping teenager, a poet or a murderer, a procrastinator or a man of action. I might be truly mad or sane pretending to be mad or even mad pretending to be sane. ~ Jasper Fforde

Military analysis is not an exact science. To return to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and paraphrase the great Chinese political philosopher, it is at least as close to art. But many logical methods offer insight into military problems-even if solutions to those problems ultimately require the use of judgement and of broader political and strategic considerations as well. Military affairs may not be as amenable to quantification and formal methodological treatment as economics, for example. However, even if our main goal in analysis is generally to illuminate choices, bound problems, and rule out bad options - rather than arrive unambiguously at clear policy choices-the discipline of military analysis has a great deal to offer. Moreover, simple back-of-the envelope methodologies often provide substantial insight without requiring the churning of giant computer models or access to the classified data of official Pentagon studies, allowing generalities and outsiders to play important roles in defense analytical debates.

We have seen all too often (in the broad course of history as well as in modern times) what happens when we make key defense policy decisions based solely on instinct, ideology, and impression. To avoid cavalier, careless, and agenda-driven decision-making, we therefore need to study the science of war as well-even as we also remember the cautions of Clausewitz and avoid hubris in our predictions about how any war or other major military endeavor will ultima ~ Michael O'Hanlon

The Don Juan of knowledge: he has yet to be discovered by any philosopher or poet. He is lacking in love for the things he comes to know, but he has intellect, titillation, and pleasure in the hunt and intrigues involved in coming to know--all the way up to the highest and most distant planets of knowledge--until finally nothing remains for him to hunt down other than what is absolutely painful in knowledge, like the drunkard who ends up drinking absinthe and acqua fortis. Thus he ends up lusting for hell--it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps, like everything he has come to know, it will disillusion him as well! And then he would have to stand still for all of eternity, nailed on the spot to disillusionment, and himself having become the stone guest longing for an evening meal of knowledge that he never again will receive!--For the entire world of things no longer has a single morsel to offer this hungry man. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

An old philosopher said to Monsieur Coignard, a Reverend Father: 'You are a pig!' To which Abad Coignard answered: 'You flatter me, sir. But unfortunately, I'm only a man.' ~ Anatole France

An unbalanced soul seeks equilibrium. I seek a constitutional form to gather my thoughts. I wish to form a flexible personality. I desire to be gentle and fluid of mind. I wish to summon hidden personal powers, but I lack the knowledge and wisdom to do so. I lack a cohesive unifying spirit. I have yet to claim the authenticity of my life. I failed to accept that what anyone else thinks of me would not stave off an inevitable death. I have not claimed a purpose for living. I have not found a basic truth that I can live and die supporting. I failed to exert the resolute will to become who I aspire to be. I rejected abstract concepts and failed to endorse the systematic reasoning of philosophical studies. I indulged in the type of obsessive excessive self-analysis, which leads to the brink of personal destruction through self-objectification and artificial triumphs. Echoing the words of Romanian philosopher and writer E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), 'I've invented nothing; I've simply been the secretary of my sensations. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Humiliation and gratitude are the proper fruits of mercies received: I say, humiliation first, and then gratitude. This is not the order in which these feelings arise in the mind of a philosopher: but it is the order in which they rise in the heart of a Christian: a sense of unworthiness abases his soul in the dust, and enhances, beyond all expression, the favours conferred upon him. We appeal to every spiritual person for the truth of this: and we call on every one, whatever be the mercies he has received, to express his sense of them in this way. ~ Anonymous

The reality of the Islamic metaphysical world was not taken seriously despite the fact that Iqbal, who was the ideological founder of Pakistan, had shown much interest in Islamic philosophy, although I do not think that he is really a traditional Islamic philosopher. He himself was influenced by Western philosophy, but at least was intelligent enough to realize the significance of Islamic philosophy. The problem with him was that he did not know Arabic well enough. His Persian was very good, but he could not read all the major texts of Islamic philoso- phy, which are written mostly in Arabic. Nevertheless, he wrote on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and he had some philosophical substance, much more than the other famous reformers who are men- tioned all the time, such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Muh:ammad 'Abduh. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight. ~ Wilhelm Reich

The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good. ~ T. Greenwood

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom. ~ Jonathan Swift

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And ~ Douglas Adams

a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In ~ John Williams

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries. ~ Steven Weinberg

If you think you are the philosopher then I am the philosophy. ~ Amit Abraham

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet. ~ Mary Midgley

Knowledge cannot lose when it bets against unawareness.
Insight cannot lose when it bets against obliviousness.
Intellect cannot lose when it bets against shallowness.
Wisdom cannot lose when it bets against ignorance.

Truth cannot lose when it bets against deceitfulness.
Sight cannot lose when it bets against blindness.
Virtue cannot lose when it bets against sinfulness.
Light cannot lose when it bets against darkness.

Patience cannot lose when it bets against hastiness.
Joy cannot lose when it bets against unhappiness.
Faith cannot lose when it bets against fickleness.
Mercy cannot lose when it bets against vengefulness.

Humility cannot lose when it bets against insolence.
Kindness cannot lose when it bets against callousness.
Dignity cannot lose when it bets against uncouthness.
Love cannot lose when it bets against bitterness.

Innocence cannot lose when it bets against unrighteousness.
Patience cannot lose when it bets against intolerance.
Trust cannot lose when it bets against doubtfulness.
Purity cannot lose when it bets against hatefulness.

Existence cannot lose when it bets against unconsciousness.
Time cannot lose when it bets against impermanence.
Life cannot lose when it bets against existence.
Eternity cannot lose when it bets against coincidence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age. ~ Benazir Bhutto

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician. ~ Glenn T. Seaborg

...the Kabbalist was interested not in the perfected text whose author is dead and can no longer respond but in contact with the living Author for whom the text is an intermediary. Even when the pneuma was needed in order to better understand the Bible, the content of this deeper apprehension was, in many cases, a better insight into divine matters. According to the French philosopher, the death of the author is a condition for finalizing the text and rendering it into a static perfection, allowing for a "complete" relation. This request is based upon a rigid attitude toward the contents, which are to be approached when they can no longer change. It is an axiom of the Kabbalists that the sacred text is in an ongoing process of change, evidently a symptom of its inherent infinity and divinity. For them, Scripture is a way of overcoming the post-prophetic eclipse of revelation, an endeavor to recapture the presence of the Author and its nature; the biblical text produces a silent dialogue and eventually even union between Author and reader,.. ~ Moshe Idel

For some natures learn with greater difficulty and after greater delay than others, that the real importances of our existence are the nothingnesses of every-day life, the nothingnesses which the philosopher in his study, reasoning about and analyzing human character, is apt to overlook; but which, nevertheless, make him and everyone else more of a human reality and less of an abstraction. ~ Beatrice Harraden

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear. ~ Anatole France

Everyone is trying to be famous and everyone is trying to trend. These people and the ones who are seeking attention on social media .They are more pandemic than corona virus, because they are misleading, hurting and destroying lot of lives while they are at it. ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos

An enthusiastic philosopher, of whose name we are not informed, had constructed a very satisfactory theory on some subject or other, and was not a little proud of it. "But the facts, my dear fellow," said his friend, "the facts do not agree with your theory." - "Don't they?" replied the philosopher, shrugging his shoulders, "then, tant pis pour les faits;" - so much the worse for the facts! ~ Charles Mackay

Who, however, is in doubt 'and' awe (thaumázein) about a matter doesn't believe in the thing to begin with. That is why the friend of Stories (mŷthos) is also in a certain way a philosopher; because the Story arises out of awe.' (Aristotle's Metaphysics: Book I. Part II) ~ Aristotle

Only a genius can overlook the chaos ~ Philosopher 'X'

Doing unnecessary things waste time.
Buying unnecessary things waste money.
Doing both cause Poverty. ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos