All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“I want to be able to memorize poetry, to know the languages of the world, to remember the names of mountains and rivers. I want to be able to turn this mind of mine into a sanctuary. To stay silent as though it were a library or a museum. Beautiful and mystical.”

“I walk, not with knowledge in each stride, but with wisdom in each step.”

“Being kind takes more heart than effort.”

“Some stories remain incomplete but they are beautiful.”

“What soul is to to the body, common sense is to the mind.”

“Knowledge teaches me to run, but wisdom teaches me to walk.”

“He loved staring at the sky. The sky in all its beautiful colors always captured his imagination. And tonight while staring at the sky, he kept on thinking about the coming days. He was at a crossroad in life. One decision would take him in one way while the other decision would take him in the other. He kept on staring at the sky!”

“It is empowering to think in terms of divine order. We are all loved children of this infinite and beautiful Universe. There is a raison d’etre for where we are and why we manage to endure. Looking for the lesson in something dark is a powerful way of not becoming absorbed by it.”

“The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that ‘only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate.”

“O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer. You are thinking, he said, that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails? We are priests of power, he said. God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is slavery’. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone – free- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body – but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter – external reality, as you would call it – is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute….But how can you control matter? He burst out. You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death- O’Brien silenced him by a movement of the hand. We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston….But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny-helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited…Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exist except through human consciousness…”

“Love is a sublime riddle wrapped in tenderness imbued with the ardor kiss of Divinity.”

“You see, with big life decisions such as this, I always say it’s best not to think about things too much, because you’ll probably talk yourself out of it. I have lived my life by that philosophy and on the whole it’s delivered below-par results. But I find it’s best not to think about this too much.”

“It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.”

“Meeting new people is a common aspect of developing social or romantic relationships. However mantaining trust is one of the most complicated characteristics of socialization when forming a friendship or an intimacy with a life partner.”

“The stuff of thought is historical stuff―no matter how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific theory.”