Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence. It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ they yell, ‘we are floating in space!’ But none of the people down there care
People should decide on the books’ meanings for themselves. They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
There are two mindsets people tend to have: explorer or settler. Our society has a “settler” mindset, our end goals are “finalizing” (home, marriage, career, etc.) in a world that was made for evolution, in selves that do nothing but grow and expand and change. People with “explorer” mindsets are able to actually enjoy what they have and experience it fully because they are inherently unattached
Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings.
Every individual, however original he may be, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family and friends. Only thus is he truly himself. If in all this relativity he tries to be the absolute, then he becomes ridiculous.
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
Together, Light and Knowledge are Inanimate, Intangible, and Inseparable.
But Dr. Smith says, and I believe it to be a true state of the case, that he himself gave a course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, during the same winter, and that the money raised by them was also applied towards paying for the Orrery.
While many explorers like to endure hardship by traveling to remote inhospitable parts of the world, I prefer to explore from the comfort of my own home.
One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.
The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it.
I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn’t get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.
Do you know where your breakthrough begins? Your breakthrough begins where your excuses ends.
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.
There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from ‘folk-diseases,’ with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own ‘healthy- mindedness.’ But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called ‘healthy-mindedness’ looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
Maybe that’s it, […] [w]ith what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces. […] Maybe […] what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.
I’ve had two children. I’ve had three boyfriends. I’ve had a lot of things happen that can change your opinions and values and philosophies.
Plato claimed that we were all joined to someone else once, we were humans with four arms and four legs, and a head of two faces, but we were so powerful we threatened to topple the Gods. So they split us from our sole mates down the middle, and doomed us to live forever without our counterparts
History is the great dust-heap… a pageant and not a philosophy.
Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?
When you use your energy and resources to punish people, you run out of energy and resources to protect people.
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
We cannot be held to promises beyond our power or our means. That is why – since nothing is really in our power but our will – it is on the will that all the rules and duties of Man are based and established.
Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One’s own karma, one’s own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever.
There’s no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that’s that.
For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Sooner or later, you will have to decide. Whether you want to drift with the current or whether you want to lay down your own path. Trust me, nobody in this world really knows where he is headed. Yes, of course, you will find people who say that they know how to live their lives. But even they can’t answer where their lives would lead. So, decide! What is more important to you? How? Where? Or why?
I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don’t constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood – which are my ideals.
The philosophy of the school was quite simple – the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like.
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told…and have a sense of humor doing it.
To be yourself is in many ways to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that’s not really getting along with anyone. That’s just self erasure.
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.
A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.
Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficialto the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery
I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life – without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.
I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don’t even need or want to look ‘intelligent’ anymore.
If the sum of living be love’s fee,Tremble. You are my one eternity.
Is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’ own personality?