Citations aléatoires

Citations en
Triées par
Auteur
Sujet
Texte
2494 citations     Montrer comme liste

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
The masses are the opium of religion.
Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.
To conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle.
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.
Non c'è dubbio che questo poveraccio [William Blake] fosse pazzo, ma c'è qualcosa nella sua pazzia che attira il mio interesse più dell'equilibrio di Lord Byron e Walter Scott.
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Genius is nothing but continued attention.
Listen with Ease. Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything, don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
CONFERENCE: A gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
The future depends on what you do today.
For every complicated problem there is a simple, easy to understand, wrong answer.
The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.
If you have no problem, you've got a problem.
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
In order to learn one must change one’s mind.
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. 
Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.
The whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are bound to make you into opponents of psychoanalysis.
Young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity--- romantic love and gunpowder.
Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete.
If you don't like being alone, you may not like the person you're with.
I've had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn't.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. 
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
Photographs can be seen as tiny quotes from the text of the larger, real world.
You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.
I have no faith, luckily. If I had, I should live in constant fear of losing it. Hence, far from helping me, it would do nothing but injure me.
As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
Visits always give pleasure--if not the arrival, the departure.
In God we trust; all others must pay cash.
Non esiste nulla all'infuori del Tutto.
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Think like a man of action. Act like a man of thought.
Man (like the other animals) is not born to enjoy life, but only to perpetuate life, to communicate it to others who come after, to conserve it. Neither he himself, nor life, nor any object of this world is actually made for him, but, on the contrary, he exists completely for life. Terrifying, but a true proposition of all metaphysics.
Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
To me, Mother Nature isn't nearly as scary as human nature.
In no one did I find who I should be like. And I stayed like that: like no one.
Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don't know how to love.
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.
People run in packs because they don't feel safe alone. I run alone because I don't feel safe in packs.
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.
The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
God must love the common man, he made so many of them.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
Science probes; it does not prove.
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
All things living are in search of a better world.
Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.
Through a narrow window we can see only part of the sky, and not the whole vastness, the magnificence of it.
Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching. 
Isn't it odd, that people like to fight for their religion but unwillingly live after its prescriptions.


A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
To be conspicuous by one's absence and listened to by one's silence are two little masterpieces of vanity.
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?
I like fragmentary writing, I seem to only be able to read fragments, feel fragments. And write fragments. (And live fragments.) The pieces naturally form a whole to me, the way minutes make up hours and hours make up days. Fragments flow, to me, in ways that unfragmented writings do not. They flow because they feel natural; yes, fragments feel natural, organic, uncomposed. A story well-composed might be beautiful, but it feels like a beautiful mask to me. Fragments are like the naturalness of children. Maybe that’s why I like fragments: because I can remain in childhood.
The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction.
If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word you say, talk in your sleep.
The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis.
Society exists for the benefit of its members - not the members for the benefit of society.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
STATISTICIAN: Someone who can put his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer and tell you, "on average, I feel just fine."
2494 citations     Montrer comme liste