I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It’s a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. It’s pure philosophy. And poetry.
Men have gone on to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are not real as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith.
I have learned that human beings are not searching for philosophies, even though it may seem that way sometimes. We are searching for something we can trust. And when we find ourselves in the midst of change, the philosophies are like a broken crutch. They do not hold us up. What supports us is a force, an energy, a vortex of love that expresses through us as warmth, creativity, service, and compassion.
Sometimes I think life is just a rodeo, the trick is to ride and make it to the bell.
My philosophy is very simple. To feel young, you must work as long as you can.
We negotiate with chaos for some sense of satisfaction.
Expression is never considered a given, and it is in fact maybe not what's most interesting about making art. Making art, since 1960 or something, is many things: it's a way of doing philosophy, it's a way of opening a dialogue, it's a way of putting a fact or a question out into the world, or a way of drawing people into new relationships, or a way of interrogating history. It's all these other sorts of strategies or techniques or processes that are really interesting and really valuable.
Our country is where ever we are well off.
You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.
Philosophers are all caught up in their philosophies. That's their house of cards. Religious leaders are caught up in their religious movements to the point where they forget about freedom. Everybody's got their drama going.
The real economic cleavage is not. . . between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not.
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. . . And the greatest eulogy we can give it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which two contracting parties always both gain; consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.
Throughout history, independent minds have carried mankind forward. Whether they identified how to make fire or manufacture tools, develop rational philosophy or create man-glorifying art, pioneer scientific knowledge or invent the electric light, independent thinkers have created the goods on which human life and prosperity depend.
Religion is life, philosophy is thought; religion looks up, friendship looks in. We need both thought and life, and we need that the two shall be in harmony.
It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies. . . which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.
In Tantric Buddhism we call the inherent knowledge that all animate and inanimate objects possess of themselves - their emptiness.
Philosophy can help laymen spot and reject the numerous pseudoscientific beliefs that survive in the media, such as the fantasies of psychoanalysts, evolutionary psychologists, and economic equilibrium theorists.
My style philosophy is: Be comfortable.
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.