You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don’t listen to their words, but watch their actions.
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
It’s a philosophical minefield!Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together.
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
Don’t appreciate me, I’m not up to it. Don’t criticize me, I don’t deserve it. Just be my friend and forgive me, because I am craving for it.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Encheremos o mundo de coisas preciosas. Serão tantas que os homens passarão por elas julgando-as banais.
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals.
Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.
You spend your whole life looking for answers because you think the next answer will solve all your problems: make you a little less miserable, because when you run out of questions you don’t just run out of answers… you run out hope.
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by…[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
If you want to make progress, put up with being perceived as ignorant or naive in worldly matters, don’t aspire to a reputation for sagacity. If you do impress others as somebody, don’t altogether believe it. You have to realize, it isn’t easy to keep your will in agreement with nature, as well as externals. Caring about the one inevitably means you are going to shortchange the other.
If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.
Stop wandering about! You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue-if you care for yourself at all-and do it while you can.
Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you’ll probably also scream a little. And that’ll be perfectly all right, because it’s not every day you realize you’re a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist it sounds pretentious but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.
The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses…If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,Because when you love you never know what you love,Or why you love, or what love is.Loving is eternal innocence,And the only innocence is not thinking.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
[On what young husbands should say to their wives:] I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us… I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you.
It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous — even death is terrible only if we fear it.
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.
Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.
A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings
When you are lonely for a while don’t get restless, if you had born alone, you are going to die alone then for sometime you can certainly live alone.
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
The premise of the Taker story is ‘the world belongs to man’. … The premise of the Leaver story is ‘man belongs to the world’.
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
We look for the Secret – the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, ‘God’ or whatever…and all the time it is carrying us about…It is the human nervous system itself.
We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose – even for transforming murderers into judges.
As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Some we proudly display on our arms, while others we shyly conceal. Tattoo the moments of sorrow as well as the moments of splendor and beauty. Tattoo in an acknowledgment and tribute to home, and tattooing your beliefs that define who you are. Whether we intended to or not, every moment of our lives are tattooed to our heart.
One day in my shoes and a day for me in your shoes, the beauty of travel lies in the ease and willingness to be more open.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
As I naturally go through a full range of emotions in my life, I mustn’t feel ashamed for feeling lost, for it is honest and human to feel such.
Whenever I think of something but can’t think of what it was I was thinking of, I can’t stop thinking until I think I’m thinking of it again. I think I think too much.
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well….