Zufällige Zitate

Zitate auf
Sortiert nach
Author
Thema
Texte
2653 zitate     Als Liste anzeigen

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Meditation is a valuable exercise, but eventually you have to open up your eyes and look around.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
Does pure altruism actually exist? Can you ever separate doing good from the expectation of reciprocity, public acclaim, seld-esteem, or the promise of paradise?
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
When people bother you in any way, it is because their souls are trying to get your divine attention and your blessing.
FAIRY TALE: a horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
Just be indipendent of the external world, so you don't have to fear for what's in it.
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
As a man believes, so he will act.
Freedom from mental distraction equals power.
If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
The period of enthusiasm, heat, and agitated imagination is not right [for poetic creation]; indeed it works against it. One needs a time of intensity, but tranquil intensity, a time of real genius rather than real excitement . . . , an impression of past or future or habitual emotion rather than its actual presence -- one could say its twilight rather than its bright noon. Often the best moment occurs when, the feeling and impulse being over, the mind though calm surges up again after the storm, as it were, to pleasurably recall the past sensation.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.
Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people an illusion.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Only the village idiot thinks they "belong",
The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart.
We always underestimate the ingenuity of idiots.
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.
Without context words and actions have no meaning at all.
Physics is becoming the study of organization. In this way … it will converge with biology and psychology.
Education Is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.
You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate.
The heart has its reasons that the mind knows nothing of. 
I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said 'no'.
For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion--that great engine of ignorance and bigotry--a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools.
I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.
More than any other time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But, though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
Terrorizzare i bambini con l'immagine dell'inferno, considerare la donna una creatura inferiore: è cosa buona per l'umanità?
You have to lose your mind in order to regain your senses.
... we may say of the receptors, the effectors, of the intellect and the other capacities that they are primarily safety-seeking tools.
Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
A truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively or hurt you.
True compassion is helping people help themselves.
There are two ways of spreading the light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.
Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Doctor, I have a ringing in my ears. -- Don't answer!
A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended.
Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem.
To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can not get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
What I say to myself - who says it? Who does he say it to?
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.
We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.
What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
If I am only happy for myself, many fewer chances for happiness. If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy!
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease.
There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn’t deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, anymore than your name is actually you.
Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn’t that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else.
The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.
One can live without ever having seen oneself, without knowing the color of one’s skin.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
FIDELITY: A virtue particular to those about to be betrayed.
Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.
It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e. g., “My telling you where to ?nd the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
The Observer is the Observed.
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
2653 zitate     Als Liste anzeigen