Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstory

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Freedom is the recognition of contingency.”
― Richard Rorty

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
― George Washington Burnap, The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
― Immanuel Kant

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“Dare to think!”
― Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”
― Iris Murdoch

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”
― Iris Murdoch

“We can only learn to love by loving.”
― Iris Murdock

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. ”
― Iris Murdoch

“Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.”
― Iris Murdoch