Philosophy Quotes

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.

~ Criss Jami

Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.

~ Peter Kreeft

SOSTRATUS: Observe then your injustice! You punish us who are but the slaves of Clotho's bidding, and reward these, who do but minister to another's beneficence. For it will never be said that it was in our power to gainsay the irresistible ordinances of Fate?MINOS: Ah, Sostratus; look closely enough, and you will find plenty of inconsistencies besides these. However, I see you are no common pirate, but a philosopher in your way; so much you have gained by your questions. Let him go, Hermes; he shall not be punished after that. But mind, Sostratus, you must not put it into other people's heads to ask questions of this kind.

~ Lucian Of Samosata

I didn't ask to be made a princess.This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough.Who chooses their fate? It is the third one, the tallest. Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them? she says, too quickly.

~ Guy Gavriel Kay

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings.A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.

~ Richmond Lattimore

I've been coerced into free will.

~ Brian Spellman

RELIGION OR COUNTRYOur allegiance may determine the fate of others

~ Kamil Ali

Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.

~ Raheel Farooq

Quand le doigt montre le ciel, l’imbécile regarde le doigt. [When a finger is pointing up to the sky, only a fool looks at the finger.]

~ Jean-Pierre Jeunet

For the grace of bearing life's inevitable evils is itself agood, and makes goodness arise even from evils byopposing them or enduring them with courage.

~ A.c. Grayling

perhaps the problem of evil is a human problem, one of an egotistical mind-set, an anthropocentric bent in our thinking and perspective.

~ Jacob M. Held

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.

~ Ayn Rand

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

~ Ayn Rand

Collectivism is the philosophy of every cockroach and sewer rat: If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it. Thefact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-humanviewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and progressive does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

~ Larken Rose

Evil exemplifies the contemptuous transgression and annihilation of virtue.

~ Albert Thomas Bifarelli

People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody’s back. They grow angry. They turn violent.To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes.

~ Kelseyleigh Reber

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.

~ Robert Higgs

Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.

~ Nenia Campbell

Religion became the evil of our society when it started to teach resentment and hate instead of unconditional love and wisdom.

~ Debasish Mridha

When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.

~ Peter Boghossian

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

~ Ayn Rand

The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do.

~ Stefan Molyneux

PROPAGANDA (PROP-A-GANDER)An evil grin behind a smiling clown's maskKamil Ali

~ Kamil Ali

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

~ Isabel Paterson

Your whole life, you are told what is right and what is wrong. What you should do and what you should not do. What makes a good citizen and what makes a traitorous one. What happens, then, when you do everything you are not meant to do? Break down each and every barrier? Find out how good you are by how evil you can be?

~ Laura Lam

Evil is never in a rush. It creeps up slowly. It doesn't hide, but confronts you in broad daylight. It gives decades of warnings, even centuries at times. Time is never the problem when you battle Evil. The problem is the will to fight it.

~ Amish Tripathi

An apparent misfortune of man is that neither good nor evil is an agency itself; both are equally passive choices. Man himself is the ultimate agency. He has the power to realize and activate the dead options. Only then, that is, by the action of Will, good results in good and evil in evil.

~ Raheel Farooq

The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

~ Sam Keen

What is forgotten, however, is that many times the Good we create leads to Evil that will destroy us.

~ Amish Tripathi

Doing nothing is even worse than doing the wrong thing.

~ Michelle Templet

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

~ J.m. Coetzee

Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness

~ Emmanuel Levinas

Non-duality has been the root of all religious movements on this planet.

~ Abhijit Naskar

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that’s the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

A scientist first has to presuppose any theory based on available relevant data. In terms of such presupposition, a scientist begins his journey of scientific exploration as a philosopher.

~ Abhijit Naskar

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.

~ Carl Sagan

You are born every day, until the day you finally die.

~ Amitav Chowdhury

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

~ Peter Watts

The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.

~ Sam Harris