Philosopher King Quotes

We have started the journey- no turning back now. Three steps lie between us and the goal:

(1) Know who you are.
(2) Know what you need.
(3) Get it.

These steps need to be taken in sequence. I cannot know what I need before I know who I am. I cannot go after what I need before I know what I need. ~ Mark Hebwood

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned gove ~ Will Durant

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher, ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings. ~ Thomas More

For statesmanship is a science and an art; one must have lived for it and been long prepared. Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation. "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership meet in the same man, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race" (473). This is the key-stone of the arch of Plato's thought. ~ Will Durant

Syracuse was again ruled by Dionysuis II,
the former young philosopher king was now an overbearing and unjust Tyrant. ~ Daniel Peter Buckley

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. ~ Stephen King

Are you not the one who told me that she had to petition the king to get her husband to sleep with her?"
"Aye,that is the gossip at court, but no one knows what she looks like save the king,and he refuses to discuss it. 'Sides, her husband died on the way home to perform his ... er duty."
"'Twas probably suicide," Amaury muttered grimly. ~ Lynsay Sands

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense. ~ Lily King

This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. to him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might say that throughout his life a philosopher remains as thin-skinned as a child. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Mrs Farleigh," he called. She stopped and gave him her shoulder, not quite meeting his eyes. Still wary, and that made him angrier yet. "I want you to trounce me."
Her head snapped up. "Pardon?"
"It is down to you and me. We are battling it out, to see who will be king of the indifferent shots in this competition. Only one of us will prevail.I shall shoot to win." He really was angry, he realized - furious to imagine her spending her autumns deliberately hiding what she could do, hiding the extent of her ability from the man who should treasure it. It was as if she'd left a vast swath of her ability unclaimed, hidden behind a swirl of feminine smiles. He didn't like the idea. He didn't like it at all. ~ Courtney Milan

Da-da chum da-da che, not to worry you've got the key! ~ Stephen King

A great king should rather be a dog that killeth clean, than a cat that patteth and sporteth with his prey. ~ E.R. Eddison

I was drunk and half killed with fuckin ~ Stephen King

King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France ... settle your debt to the king of Heaven; return to the Maiden, who is envoy of the king of Heaven, the keys to all the good towns you took and violated in France. ~ Joan Of Arc

He kissed you! He f@*#king kissed you right in front of me," Wharick growled through his clenched teeth. Kathel looked up from the ground where he was now leaning up on his elbows, far too pleased with his performance and having a look of mischief on his face. "Would you prefer that I kiss her when we aren't in front of you?" he asked sarcastically. ~ Madison Thorne Grey

I don't think I'll still be riding at 40. There are a couple of people who are still riding after having kids, like Mary King, but people say that you lose your nerve after you have kids. It's the risk. ~ Zara Phillips

Borrowing other people's culture and adopting other people's way of life does destroy nation's self-respect which is the greatest asset a true citizen can enjoy more than food and clothes, more than all amenities and more than military glory. You can adopt a system of government and a way of life, but can you adopt the past history, travail and tradition out of which that system of government and a way of life were evolved? Can we adopt King Charles, King John, Magna Carta and civil wars and Cromwell as our own? They can always say "We evolved a system and a way of life", but we must always sing in refrain, "We borrowed them". Adopting a culture is not the same as adopting the use of a gadget. It is like tying other peoples' mangoes to your tree, while plucking and throwing away your own. How absurd! ~ Manasa Rao

I've always considered them ideas, forever recorded." Malone motioned to one of the paperbacks. "Malory wrote King Arthur in the late part of the 15th century. So you're reading his thoughts from five hundred years ago. We'll never know Malory, but we know his imagination. ~ Steve Berry

Getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner. ~ Stephen King

You're like an alcohol in my veins. ~ A.S. King

I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this. ~ L.A. Paul

The intimate and the infinite are tangled together in this incandescent book, lit by Aristotle's bright spark of a daughter. Lucid even in nightmare, The Sweet Girl slips sideways around the philosopher to examine the lives of girls and women when we were not yet human. ~ Marina Endicott

A king who does not protect his people is no king at all. ~ George R R Martin

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera - things like songs and moonlight and kisses - were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.
That was good. ~ Stephen King

Over the obsidian hills and the sunken yellow dale, through the vast oceans of fog and the fires of nevermore, sits the fickle doors of the land of twilight. I will traverse it all, and execute righteous judgment on all that oppose me. ~ H.S. Crow

It seems some have chosen to ignore or have simply forgotten the big-picture vision promoted by Dr. King and his kin. ~ Al Sharpton

The man in black fled across the dessert and the gunslinger followed. ~ Stephen King

He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world. ~ Socrates

We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know. ~ Stephen King

Everyone have a game, everyone is playing in his own game and his own game he is the king the others are the other figures from the chess. ~ Deyth Banger

Alysanne would like that," the king said. "She enjoys the company of clever women. ~ George R.R. Martin

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities. ~ C. G. Jung

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it. ~ Marilyn French

I just met Stephen King in my dreams... I just said what I have watched and read from his books... Mainly I received a hug from him, it was like we are friends from long time. ~ Deyth Banger

If that's what you want, I'll give that to you. However, I need you to know that my heart, my mind and my soul belong to you. No one else can touch them like you because you and I both know that we are mates. ~ Brey King

Them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town - this was going on to the end of April - the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series. Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid's; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. ~ Stephen King

It's not okay to send a feeble kid out to fight our battles, and it's not okay to push people around like pawns on a fuckin chessboard and it's not okay giving orders to kill like a Mafia boss. ~ Stephen King

My mother used to say you should eat like a king in the morning, a queen at noon, and a pauper at night ~ K.S.R. Burns

But I'm going, because all I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down alot and bleed alot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for ... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you. pg 78 ~ Stephen King

How terrible," said Eragon, "to die alone, separate even from the one who is closest to you."
Everyone dies alone, Eragon. Whether you are a king on a battlefield or a lowly peasant lying in bed among your family, no one can accompany you into the void. ~ Christopher Paolini