Quotes to Contemplate
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Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?
- Diogenes |
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I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details
- Albert Einstein |
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Why is there something rather than nothing? - Schelling
Know Thyself Self-Realization is necessary before God-Realization The unexamined life is not worth living – Socrates Do you deny me the entrance to heaven, I who have at last learned the mystery of myself - (Egyptian Mystery School Adage) The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone - Ayn Rand Let no one who can be his own belong to another – Paracelsus Thou art a Man, God is no more; Thy own humanity learn to adore – William Blake God only acts and is, in existing beings or men – William Blake In your own bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth; and all you behold, though it appears without, it is within – William Blake Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man – Alexander Pope You yourself are even another little world and have within you the sun and the moon and also the stars - Origen You are the temple of God. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are - 1 Corinthians 3:16 He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls - Proverbs 25:28 When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty - Gospel of Thomas Jesus said: If you have gained this within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have this in you, what you do not have in you will kill you – Gospel of Thomas He who knows himself knows God – Clement of Alexandria Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn; The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain, Unless within thyself it be set up again - Angelus Silesius Whoever cannot find a temple in his heart, the same can never find his heart in any temple - Mikhail Naimy When the two shall be one, the outside as the inside, and the male and the female neither male nor female - Clement of Alexandria According to Bishop Epiphanius, the Krist is the spiritual self within each person - Tony Bushby The self as the essence of individuality is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal - Carl Jung ...a distorted development of autonomy is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings - Arno Gruen The most strongly enforced of all known taboos, is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego - Alan Watts The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will often be lonely, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself - Friedrich Nietzsche Many stand outside at the door, but it is only the solitaries who will enter into the bridal chamber - Jesus Christ It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society - J. Krishnamurti ‘Till the false is seen as the false, truth is not – J. Krishnamurti Human sickness is so severe that few can bear to look at it...but those who do will become well - Vernon Howard When told that man lives in delusion everyone thinks of himself as the exception; hence his delusion - Vernon Howard The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by the analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it – Carl Gustav Jung We would rather forgive the evil proliferating all around us than the rebellion against it, which we mistake for the true evil - Arno Gruen Nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse - Sophocles Bodies cannot be changed except by reduction into their first matter – Figulus In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule - Friedrich Nietzsche All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently suppressed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident – Arthur Schopenhauer Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy - Blaise Pascal Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction - Blaise Pascal The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, for wild beasts to fight in – Voltaire I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honor – Arthur Schopenhauer Spiritual ignorance is the mother of all evil. Ignorance will eventuate in death, because those who come from ignorance neither were, nor are, nor shall be - (Gospel of Philip) In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration - Jakob Burckhardt The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization - Emerson Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of all misfortune – Plato We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light - Plato What is the first business of philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows – Epictetus The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things – Epictetus To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust – Henri David Thoreau Philosophy is not a theory but an activity – Ludwig Wittgenstein It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not - Tiresius to Oedipus Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy – F. Scott Fitzgerald Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black were I read white - William Blake History is a gallery where we see very few originals and many copies – Alex de Tocqueville Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel – Horace Walpole The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools – Herbert Spencer The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt - Bertrand Russell People will cease to commit atrocities when they cease to believe absurdities - Voltaire Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known - Michel de Montaigne The educated person is someone who knows how to find out what he does not know - George Simmel Where there is no vision the people perish – Proverbs 29:18 …every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs – Henrik Ibsen Most people don't know what they're doing, and a lot of them are really good at it - George Carlin Beware the barrenness of a busy life – Socrates The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness - Vernon Howard The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth - Vernon Howard A false path must be tensely and angrily defended by those it has deceived - Vernon Howard Ignorant people remain ignorant because they have a secret agreement to call one another intelligent – Vernon Howard See human nonsense as nonsense and save years of trying to make sense out of it – Vernon Howard Healing fails to occur because it is much easier to injure another than to heal oneself – Vernon Howard Ridicule is the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius - Anon They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth - Plato 'Till now man has been up against Nature. From now he will be up against his own nature - Dennis Gabor I salute the light within your eyes where the whole Universe dwells. For when you are at the center within yourself and I within mine, we shall be as one - Crazy Horse The Earth and myself are of one mind - Chief Joseph I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature - J. J. Rousseau Nature brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander – Louis Agassiz I believe that most of what was said of God was in reality said of that Spirit whose body is Earth – George Russell Come to the center of the earth and there you will find the Philosopher's Stone - (Alchemical Adage) Our exile has not only been from the Goddess, but also from Nature. It is not surprising, considering that most Westerners live apart from their environment, protected by concrete roadways, consuming machine-processed foods and filled with media information to the detriment of the experience of our own senses. The seasons go unnoticed, we seldom touch the earth, eat fresh food or observe the world personally...The sacred is a forgotten dimension in our society which we ignore at our peril - Caitlin Matthews Men are the devils of the earth, and animals the souls they torment - Arthur Schopenhauer To Blake, mainstream English philosophy from Bacon through Stewart, marked the progressive degeneration of human thought – Sheila Spector |
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…thinking which does not start from and continue in close relation to its foundations in the physical universe must lead to falsity
- Alvin Boyd Kuhn |
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The real Maya or illusion is not in the natural forms, but in the mind’s propensity to conceive or project forms created by its own inventiveness, but which do not agree with the truth extant or potential in nature
– Alvin Boyd Kuhn |
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Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? – Werner Heisenberg (Quantum Scientist)
Neither atoms, nor even subatomic particles, are real. They form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of objects or facts - Werner Heisenberg The stuff of the world is mind stuff – Sir Arthur Eddington The Great Architect of the Universe begins to appear as a pure mathematician – Sir James Jeans It we never see in front of our eyes today anything being created from nothing: where do we find the proof that it happened in the past. Have we not always been told that scientists only believe the empirical, the observable? – Hannes Alfven According to most cosmologists, nearly 99 percent of the universe is unobservable – dark, emitting no radiation at all. The universe we do see – stars, galaxies and all – is merely 1 or 2 percent of the total. The rest is some strange and unknown form of matter, particles necessitated by theory but never observed - Erich Lerner As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality - Albert Einstein Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true - Bertrand Russell The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter - Carl G. Hempel We, each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man's genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever existed in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions - Herman Hesse It does not occur to people…that now the masses are the only tyrant and at the bottom of all corruption - Soren Kierkegaard What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. Everybody in the earlier period was chained to his role in the social order. A man had little chance to move socially from one class to another, he was hardly able to move even geographically from one town or from one country to another. With few exceptions he had to stay where he was born. He was often not even free to dress as he pleased or to eat what he liked…Medieval society did not deprive the individual of his freedom, because the “individual” did not yet exist - Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom) …the vast majority of people in our culture are well adjusted because they have given up the battle for independence sooner and more radically than the neurotic person. They have accepted the judgment of the majority so completely that they have been spared the sharp pain of conflict which the neurotic person goes through. While they are healthy from the standpoint of “adjustment” they are more sick than the neurotic person from the standpoint of the realization of their aims as human beings - Erich Fromm (Institutes of the Christian Religion) Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps you will avoid falling ill in future – Sigmund Freud There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root - Henry David Thoreau ...the psyche, for better or worse, is going somewhere, and that is why the process can get stuck, why it is fraught with frustrations, arrest, fixation, stick points, logjams. If the mind weren’t going somewhere, it could never get stuck, never get “sick” - Ken Wilber ...all evolution can be described as the process of differentiation of the part from the whole, the individual from the mass, with the parts then relating to each other on a higher level – Rollo May |
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Technology...the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it - Max Frisch
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Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth - Erasmus
When you understand that other powers direct what you are doing, there is no pride when the world applauds you, and no shame when the world scorns you – Leonard Cohen Throughout the whole life one must continue to learn to live, and what will amaze your even more, throughout life one must learn to die – Seneca The gods ought to come to me, not I to them – Plotinus Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it - Sigmund Freud The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world – Freud Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question” - Freud Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it – Osho The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born ~ Nikola Tesla If you are alone you belong to yourself…If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less, in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct; and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight - Leonardo da Vinci ...a "sannyasin"...a solitary being, a wanderer, absolutely happy in his aloneness. If somebody walks by his side it is okay, it is good. If somebody leaves it is also okay, it is good. He never waits for anybody, and he never looks back. Alone, he is whole - Osho (Love, Freedom and Aloneness) If thou canst, my son, for a while but cease from all thy thinking and willing, then shall thou hear the unspeakable words of God – Jacob Bohme When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained - Mark Twain All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors…that man has two real existing principles…a Body and a Soul – Blake Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white - William Blake |
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Tyranny is always better organized than freedom - Charles Peguy
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Like two golden birds perched on the selfsame tree. Intimate friends, the ego and the Self dwell in the same body. The former eats the sweet and sour fruits of the tree of life while the latter looks on in detachment - Mundaka Upanishad
This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin – Socrates Each morning when I awake, like a student at his first class, I prepare a blank mind for the day to write upon – Bruce Lee Heraclitus…discovered the most marvelous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite – Carl Jung …I have learned from the East what it means by the phrase “Wu Wei:” namely, not-doing, letting be, which is quite different from doing nothing. Some Occidentalists, also, have known what this not-doing means, for instance Meister Eckhart, who speaks of “sich lessen, “to let oneself be. The region of darkness into which one falls is not empty; it is the “lavishing mother” of Lao Tze…When the surface has been cleared, things grow out of the depths. People always suppose that they have lost their way when they come up against these depths of experience. But if they do not know how to go on, the only answer, the only advise, that makes any senses “to wait for what the unconscious as to say about the situation” - Carl Jung Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on unrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of the one and the same thing – Carl Jung …man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them – Carl Jung A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master - Carl Jung All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not. It is true that the forms of archetypes are to a considerable extent interchangeable, but their numinosity is and remains a fact – Carl Jung All of yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture, to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do – Carl Jung Why does man not see things as they are? – because he is himself standing in the way: he conceals things – Nietzsche Anyone who is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or through external imposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe, and suffers accordingly – Aleister Crowley The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself to either himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, not the other in himself. Hence, being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely - R. D. Laing Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religions call Good and Evil – Blake Eternity is in love with the products of time – William Blake Just as our one body is composed of many members which are held together by one soul, so I think that the universe ought to be thought of as an immense, complex organism held together by the power and reason (logos) of God as by a single soul - Origen America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization - Georges Clemenceau |
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Truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. My only concern is to set humanity absolutely, unconditionally free. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection – Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Most men occasionally stumble over the truth but they pick themselves up and continue on as if nothing ever happened – Winston Churchill
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, for wild beasts to fight in – Voltaire Never befriend the oppressed unless you want to take on the oppressor – Ogden Nash The fates guide him who will, him who won’t they drag – Latin adage Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel – Horace Walpole A lone eccentric built the ark, a team of experts built the Titanic – Anon If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody - George Carlin Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man – Pope Thou art a Man, God is no more; Thy own humanity learn to adore – Blake The only good is knowledge and the only evil ignorance - Socrates He is richest who is content with the least - Socrates They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth - Plato The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes - Proust Earthly things must be known to be loved, heavenly things must be loved to be known - Pascal I would sooner take instruction from the builders of the temple of Luxor, than from the creators of napalm - Anthony West The most exotic fruits are found behind the plainest leaves - Milton Perceval The greatest good you can do for another is not to share your riches with him but to reveal to him his own - Disraeli The best wine is the oldest, the best water the freshest – anon The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one – William Stekel I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction – J. Steinbeck The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad, has made it ugly and bad - Nietzsche There are no facts, only interpretations – Nietzsche I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times – Thomas Jefferson We can accept God becoming Man to save Man, but not Man becoming God to save himself – Vernon Howard Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent can always recognize Genius – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Only by the painstaking elimination of the untrue, does one find the Truth – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Until the false is seen as false, the truth is not - J. Krishnamurti The falsification of history has done more to mislead humans than any single thing known to mankind – Rousseau The one who plants the tree, is not the one who will enjoy the fruit – Chinese Adage One who does not like to read is equal to one who cannot read - Anon Despise learning and make everyone pay for your ignorance - Anon Because it is sometimes so unbelievable, the truth often escapes being known – Heraclitus During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love, than a success at something you hate – George Burns My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute - Ayn Rand |
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