Drew > Drew's Quotes

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“The man of wisdom is never of two minds;
the man of benevolence never worries;
the man of courage is never afraid.”
― Confucius

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.”
― Confucius

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
― Confucius

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
― Confucius

“Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.”
― Confucius

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”
― Confucius

“When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.”
― Confucius

“To see what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.”
― Confucius

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
― Confucius

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucious

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“It is only through difference that progress can be made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication--that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from any culture, but of losing all originality.”
― Claude Levi-Strauss

“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

“One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.”
― Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms

“One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
― Michel Foucault

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”
― Michel Foucault

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault

“The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.”
― Michel Foucault