Philosophical Quotes

“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

“If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us.”
― chetan bhagat

“They can send death at once, but life is slower...”
― Ursula K. Le Guina K. Le Guin, Rocannon’s World

“آری تنها یک مسئله‌ی اساسی مطرح است:
تشخیص سایه‌ی وجود از اصل وجود”
― علامه طباطبایی

“The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.

(The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.”
― Russell Hoban

“What did you do with the time and talents i gave you? God's question...”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History

“That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.”
― Euripides, Trojan Women

“... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, A Compendium of Essays: Purcell, Hogarth and Handel, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, and Andrew Lloyd Webber

“In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world.”
― William Gay, The Long Home

“I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“How curious it was, [...], that we humans had taken millions of year to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Listen." Jennifer reverted, "I didn't mean anything by all of that before. I understand what you were trying to do and ..." She struggled for the right words. "Sweetie, like love, people don't live inside of life, life lives inside of you. Open yourself up to it and there's no stopping your heart.”
― Carroll Bryant, Children of the Flower Power

“There is such dissociation between what the eyes see and what the mind envisions. The final thought is just a matter of interpretation, coloured by our experiences.”
― Anirban Bose, Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls

“Everything you know gained from experience”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

“Despite its dark veins, the transparency of dragonfly’s wings assures me of a pure, innocent world”
― Munia Khan

“You always look on the dark side of life. I believe in capturing the moment...Joy is so fleeting. You never know when it might be snatched away.”
― Susan Wiggs, At the King's Command

“You have to set somebody free for them to return”
― Candice Night

“Small men command the letter of the law. Great men serve its spirit. For the spirit of the law is justice... and justice is the spirit of God.”
― JC Marino, Dante's Journey

“Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.”
― Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms

“Without a whole lot of pressure, a diamond is just a piece of coal.”
― Miriam Darnell

“For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.”
― Sean S Kamali

“if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The hardest thing in the world is to let go of who you once thought you were and to manifest your true self, at the risk of being unloved. This is self-actualization.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“There will never be an end to suffering. You do what you can, only what you can. Peace comes from knowing you helped those that you could”
― Brom, Lost Gods

“The dead govern the living.”
― Auguste Comte

“When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951