Top 70 Giannis Delimitsos Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Ideologies are sacred in normal times. But when chaos begins to reign, or when a radical change of the person’s status occurs, ideologies may be abandoned or created in a second.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

2. “Goodness is a powerful magnet. Goodness attracts goodness. The surest way to have good people around you is to be a good person yourself.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

3. “True friendship is the greatest wealth man can possess and one of his rarest and most valuable assets.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

4. “Before you think you are surrounded by idiots, make sure that you don’t suffer from narcissism.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

5. “A brief yet reflective walking through a cemetery is enough to teach us more than all the philosophy of the world during a lifetime.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

6. “By speaking with courtesy and respect, you are offering a wonderful gift to yourself, a useful embarrassment to the unkind, and a good example to bystanders.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

7. “Wisdom is not to know everything, but to know enough in order to stop taking yourself and the world too seriously. Wisdom could be the last and eternal Laughter!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

8. “The highest form of laughter is the laughter of understanding. When we realize that there is no real, terminal, universal or personal goal to be achieved, a huge burden is lifted from our hearts. Laughing at the world and at ourselves seems then the only rational course we can take. And the only serious.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

9. “When I arrive to a new place, it is no longer the place it was before my arrival. And I am not the same person either. I change it and it changes me on the spot. And together we give the world a slightly different face.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

10. “Today is the day. In fact, today is always the day, my friends!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

11. “A good proverb is often the marriage of a Truth to an Enchantment, where Humor is the groomsman and Irony the priest.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

12. “The glory of the Ideal is our guide for a decent approximation of It.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

13. “Science and Metaphysics show us part of what “is”. Logic and Epistemology help us interpret this part and understand how much of it we can really know. And finally, Ethics teaches us how to embrace this knowledge and how to cherry-pick only those things that will give us endurance and contentment in the long run, avoiding those that may keep our hearts buried in the ground; how to live well and decently and how to help the society function properly.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

14. “There is goodness in every woman, in every man. Some have not learned to use it yet. A part of them never will. Unfortunately, they lack the ways or the means to display it to the world.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

15. “Every opinion, every belief and even every firm conviction and certainty is a leap of faith. We just have to sort out the useful ones.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

16. “The only real freedom the human animal can achieve is the release from meanings. If we don’t have anywhere in particular to go, we can never be lost; if we have nothing to prove, we can never fail.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

17. “I can imagine the message from the billions of people who have walked the Earth, echoing from beyond the grave. It would be crystal clear for those who would be eager to listen: “live here and now in the Present, enjoy every big and every little moment, love and cherish with every beat of your heart, live passionately and die bravely!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

18. “The modern man adores individualism as long as he has freedom, health, safety and wealth, but when he loses one of them turns to the state and to others demanding compensation and support.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

19. “In a world of ceaseless labor, we are components of the Engine. Eternally struggling, pushing a Sisyphean Boulder in vain. Illusions are the keys that unlock the Doors and keep us moving on.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

20. “Life is always a victory. How can we ever fail by living, when death – the ultimate “failure” – is the only certainty?”

— Giannis Delimitsos

21. “Many ask: “Why are we so insincere, why are we so hypocrites?”. Well, it is because this is how human nature works. If there was a time and a place where human beings were 100% of the time honest, who always said what they had in mind and who didn’t care to cover their shortcomings by displaying a better persona than the “real” one, it is long since gone, wiped out from the relentless force of natural selection.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

22. “Failures are like alarm clocks. Alarm clocks wake us up from our dream and remind us that we have to go to work. Failures wake us up from our dream and remind us that we have to live as we really are; mortals and fallible.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

23. “When you stay silent, you listen. When you listen, you learn. When you learn, you know. When you know, you can understand. And when you understand, you may forgive.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

24. “The naive thinks that all wisdom lies within and no one can teach him. The wise became wise, because he accepted his nescience and opened his eyes to see the Wisdom and the Beauty around him.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

25. “Humans refined the Art of deluding themselves from that epoch when self-consciousness emerged and became their most merciless enemy.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

26. “What we call happiness and unhappiness are no more than feelings floating over the innermost halls of the soul; they are pure emotional and mental states, and thus they can never be fake, regardless of the veracity or falsity of the condition that caused them.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

27. “We learn the world to better learn ourselves. And the better we know ourselves, the more we know the world.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

28. “I can not learn Philosophy and I can not take a glimpse of Wisdom all alone and by myself. All together we philosophize, because this is the best way to do it; nay, this is the only way to do it. Of course, other thinkers cannot teach me what I already know, but they can help me unlearn what I thought I knew or see what I haven’t seen clearly yet. As a solitary thinker, I would be a mere listener of the echo of my convictions.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

29. “If you consider your life to be happy and successful, then it is exactly so. If you view your life as unhappy or as a failure, then you are right about that. Fortunately or unfortunately, you can never be wrong on this matter.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

30. “Coming face to face with Ugliness can be a misfortune or a blessing. We can imitate it and be one with it; or we can feel repugnance and appreciate the Beauty once and for all!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

31. “A good deed has to do with the results, altruism with the intentions. The good deed is, of course, what matters for the person in need or for society. After all pure altruism is rare and without a kind of benefit for the benefactor – even if that is just a pleasant feeling – charity would be almost impossible.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

32. “It is a token of a healthy spirit to freely lament your loss and hold dearly the pain and sorrow that come with it, being at the same time careful not to cling to the past, let alone mentally live in the past. The sorrow and the pain are the unerring proofs that what you have lived was strong and real, and that nothing was in vain!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

33. “The world, and we as a part thereof, are the carnival mask on the face of Nonbeing.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

34. “When we get a new idea – or remember an old one – and we cling to it and try to spread it with evangelical zeal, then we no longer have control over it. In fact, it’s the idea itself that possesses us and becomes our new master. And we end up blindly serving the idea and forgetting the cause that brought it to us in the first place.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

35. “The human existence is an audacious chaos disturbing the Order of Cosmos.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

36. “The majority of people live their lives under two complementary conditions simultaneously: confined to prisons they don’t know they exist and confined to prisons they think they exist.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

37. “Hatred is the mask of the inept.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

38. “Activity and creativity are, by and large, good for man’s soul. But remember that you don’t have to do something every single day, to be busy every single second. Not even meditation or the like. Sometimes your inner self just wants to sit, to breathe, to enjoy; to beautifully exist. Because by beautifully existing, you have already done more than enough!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

39. “The day you’ll start craving for a savior to deliver you is the day you’ll welcome any tyrant into your soul. Freedom is the game of the unsaved and the unsavable.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

40. “What is my personal history if not the heroic narrative created by myself in order to inform myself about who myself is, assisted by my tactically biased and fickle memory?”

— Giannis Delimitsos

41. “There must be a difference between a Sisyphus who hurries to lift the boulder, despite knowing that it’s going to roll down again and a Sisyphus who – fully aware of this fact – prefers to take a nap or play with his kids before the next lifting.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

42. “Man uses action to keep away the wasps of thought and understanding. The man of relentless labour and business is the perfect escapist; escaping the world by diving too deep into the world.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

43. “Death may be seen as a generous gift that is offered to us as a reward for our willingness to endure life and to play the game until the end. And if it’s true that after death there is only death, non-existence, that would be the holiest of all the blessings!”

— Giannis Delimitsos

44. “Don’t let words come out of your mouth before their essential meaning first enters your brain. And don’t let these words and their meaning reach your brain before they pass through your heart. Every understanding and every expression should always receive blessings from a loving heart.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

45. “To find a meaning or to create a meaning; there is no crucial difference as long as it takes away the unpleasant odors of the mortal existence.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

46. “Idol worship” is so deeply ingrained in the human brain synapses that it would be almost impossible to be bereft of it. And in absence of an external icon we are always going to look for it inside us. In fact, in many regions of the world this process is already in progress resulting in the pandemic of “self-admiration” and “self-deification” of our modern times.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

47. “Love, the phenomenal act of canceling self in favor of the very same self.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

48. “She who believes that science will inescapably solve humanity’s oldest problems and radically change the human lot in this world is the one who desperately needs a substitute for religion or magic. The true lover of science is she who is aware of its shortcomings and limitations, yet still cherishes it for whatever gifts it offers us.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

49. “We found the truth within us and got rid of all the lies!” they said. “Let us stop with this particular delusion”, he answered. “We nurture both the trees of truth and those of lies within us, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not. We need the shadows of both to protect us well from sunburning.”

— Giannis Delimitsos

50. “When modern man gets rid of an old, shameful illusion, he usually replaces it with a new one, subtler and more sophisticated, and therefore more potent.”

— Giannis Delimitsos