Philosophy quotes — page 22

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

All oppression creates a state of war.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength.

To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: "What are you going through?"

Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.

The evil we do is obscured and embellished by imagination.

I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of "see" which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself.

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.

Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not loosely and lightly attached to the world.

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

The concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of "ought," ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible.

It would be a great improvement if, instead of "morally wrong," one always named a genus such as "untruthful," "unchaste," "unjust."

What distinguishes actions which are intentional from those which are not? The answer that I shall suggest is that they are the actions to which a certain sense of the question "Why?" is given application.

Intentional action is action with a certain description under which it is intentional.