Visionary Hera > Visionary's Quotes

“Prior to all theory the world is given. All opinions, warranted or not, popular, superstitious, and scientific ones — they all refer to the world already given in advance. How does the world give itself to me, what can I immediately articulate about it, how can I immediately and generally describe that for what it gives itself, what it is according to its original sense, as this sense gives itself as the sense of the world itself in “immediate” perception and experience?...
...All theory refers to this immediate givenness, and theory can have a justified sense only when it forms thoughts that do not run counter to the general sense of the immediate givenness. No theorizing can contradict this sense. What is the world? It is what I find through describing and theorizing, and theorizing is only the continuation of describing, being a more broadly encompassing describing. To seek for more has no meaning.”
― Edmund Husserl

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.”
― Edmund Husserl

“First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.”
― Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”
― René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

“Dubium sapientiae initium. (Doubt is the origin of wisdom.)”
― Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”
― Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

“It's all there, it's all waiting. Of course it can be done; it depends upon ourselves.

You say: "But again, we're scattered individuals. Everything's against us. Governments, money, press, television - all the new forces are used against us." All the great forces, all the material powers of the world, you say, are against you. And so they are - you're quite right to feel that.

And I don't underrate them, but I don't despair and you shouldn't despair. Because you, like I, have read something of history. You know something of the record of the achievement of Europeans. And dark as this hour is, it's no darker, it's not as dark as some of the hours you've known in European history.

When everything was cowardice, treachery, and betrayal. And when the Saracen hordes from far outside Europe swept right across that continent, and would've come on over our own Britain too, if they hadn't been stopped. And it didn't only happen once, it's happened more than once.

Small bands of men in resolution, in absolute determination, giving themselves completely and saying "Europe shall live!" And they stood firm and faced the menace to Europe: its values, its civilizations, the glory of its achievement - all those things in mortal danger. And they stood firm, they faced it, they came together, and more and more ran it to their standards, and those hordes were thrown back. Again and again and again, our Europe lived in triumph because the will of Europe still endured!

We've got other forces against us - not those particular forces, but the power of money, the power of press. All those things are against us. And how can you stop it? My friends, by an act of will, an act of the European will.

My friends, today, just as much as in the past, we can meet the dark forces which in another way threaten our European life with eternal night. We can rally those forces, and in the end, we can prevail and we can triumph!”
― Oswald Mosley

“Naturally we believe in our own race. Any man or woman worth anything believes in his own race as he believes in his own family. But because you believe in your own race or in your own family doesn't mean you want to injure other races or other families.”
― Oswald Mosley

“Jews must put the interests of Britain before those of Jewry, or be deported from Britain. This is not a principle of racial or religious persecution. Any well-governed nation must insist that its citizens owe allegiance to the nation, and not to co-racialists and co-religionists resident outside its borders or organised as a state within the State. The Jews, as a whole, have chosen to organise themselves as a nation within the Nation and to set their interests before those of Great Britain.”
― Oswald Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Philosophy can make people sick.”
― Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act...”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“There are three kinds of constitution, and an equal number of deviation-forms--perversions, as it were, of them. The constitutions are monarchy, aristocracy, and thirdly that which is based on a property qualification, which it seems appropriate to call timocratic, though most people are wont to call it polity. The best of these is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects. For a man is not a king unless he is sufficient to himself and excels his subjects in all good things; and such a man needs nothing further; therefore he will not look to his own interests but to those of his subjects; for a king who is not like that would be a mere titular king. Now tyranny is the very contrary of this; the tyrant pursues his own good. And it is clearer in the case of tyranny that it is the worst deviation-form; but it is the contrary of the best that is worst. Monarchy passes over into tyranny; for tyranny is the evil form of one-man rule and the bad king becomes a tyrant. Aristocracy passes over into oligarchy by the badness of the rulers, who distribute contrary to equity what belongs to the city-all or most of the good things to themselves, and office always to the same people, paying most regard to wealth; thus the rulers are few and are bad men instead of the most worthy. Timocracy passes over into democracy; for these are coterminous, since it is the ideal even of timocracy to be the rule of the majority, and all who have the property qualification count as equal. Democracy is the least bad of the deviations;”
― Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them.”
― Aristotle, Ethics

“How can a man know what is good or best for him, and yet chronically fail to act upon his knowledge?”
― Aristotle, Ethics

“The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious (akolastos); but if a man behaves like a boor (agroikos) and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.”
― Aristotle , The Nicomachean Ethics

“bad men... aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labor and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage to himself criticizes his neighbor and stands in his way; for if people do not watch it carefully the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“The man who does not enjoy doing noble actions is not a good man at all.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“No more will there be any difference between 'the ideal good' and 'good' in so far as both are good.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“the good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine.”
― Aristotle,, Nicomachean Ethics

“Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction. . . just as a piece of land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to nourish the seed, so the mind of the pupil has to be prepared in its habits if it is to enjoy and dislike the right things.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics