“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.” — Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. (1/2)

“So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.” — Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951

“We seek beauty because it seems to promise something beyond what we have already seen and what we already are. We seek beauty everywhere we can find it — in art, in literature, in the clouds & stars, in flowers & animals. But perhaps most significantly, we seek beauty in our fellow human beings.”

“In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. (1/2)

“However rare true love may be, true friendship is even rarer.” — François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

“It is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. (1/2)

“Even if one sees a friend or an enemy behaving badly, one can reflect that there are specific conditioning factors that determine this, and thereby remain happy.” — Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Crosby & Skilton tr. (6:33)

“You've put too much emphasis on your prediction. You've taken it as a certainty when it's really just a product of your own judgment. You've cut yourself off from potential benefits because of your confidence in the accuracy of your prediction.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/predic...

“The Romans were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.” — Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

“In the long run, men only hit what they aim at.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The citizens of a free state suffer themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion as, hurried on by a blind ambition, and looking rather below than above them, they come to love authority more than independence.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

“You will have to change, but it is because the world must change too. You change by becoming more aware of the self and the world, and by doing so, you begin to improve both through the creative effort of compassion.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/you-have-t...

“Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. (1/2)

“Would you have ever learned or discovered anything, if you had not been willing to learn from others?” — Socrates, in Plato’s Alcibiades I

“Morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly.” — Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“She could not bring herself to do something simply because another person told her to do it. The only time she did what someone wanted was when their rules happened to align with what she was already going to do anyway.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/the-re...

“Art is this intense form of individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up.” — Oscar Wilde

“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.” — Seneca, Hercules Furens

“The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has perhaps never surmounted.” — Georges Bataille, L'Abbé C

“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. (1/2)

“With broader awareness, I will begin to intuitively see how to act from compassion and not from attachment to particular intentions. But because my intentions are numerous and varied, hidden attachments can easily undermine the freedom of attention necessary for my awareness to expand.” Read more:

“Unclear thinking and sentimental emotionalism are as frequently united with a ruthless will to self-assertion, to ascendancy at all cost, as is a warm benevolence and desire to help with the drive to clean and clear thinking, to moderation and restraint of feeling.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence.” — Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto

“When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.” — Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.” — Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End

“To fall in line with the world, to conform to its every facet, is to abandon the self completely. It is to abandon all that makes you a valuable and creative force for compassion. Do not grant the world power over you that it does not possess.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/you-ha...

“There is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so.” — John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“The more strenuously you seek esteem from others, the less of it you will have. It depends on respect. You can’t simply grab it, you have to deserve it and wait for it.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus #philosophy #philsky

“Each one depends upon others, and what happens to me by means of others depends upon me as regards its meaning; one does not submit to a war or an occupation as he does to an earthquake: he must take sides for or against, and the foreign wills thereby become allied or hostile. (1/2)

“The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.” — Horace, Epistles

“The ancients used to say: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur — the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” — Stanisław Lem, A Blink of an Eye

“Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.” — Michel de Montaigne, Essais

“You wonder if people understand what you're trying to do. You wonder if you just don't have what it takes. You wonder if you should do something else. Something that could make you some money, for one thing. Something that would feel like less of a dead end.” Read more:

“In poverty and other misfortunes of life, men think friends to be their only refuge. The young they keep out of mischief, to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they stimulate to noble deeds.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics #philosophy #philsky

“Well done is better than well said.” — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

“Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.” — Rachel Carson, Under the Sea Wind

“Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, (1/2)

“That there is any goodness in the world means there are people willing to disregard the harm done to them and respond compassionately to it. They choose to absorb the wrongdoing rather than helping to perpetuate it.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/goodne...

“One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean?” — Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities

“I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force — against other forces. Which ones? The thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc.). Or again: against language.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

“Many things are in a certain sense natural, which are neither wise nor best. It is natural to walk, but shall men therefore refuse to ride? It is natural to ride on horseback, shall men therefore refuse steam and rail?” — Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nationality (1869)"

“To think of language as a picture of the world — a set of representations which philosophy needs to exhibit as standing in some sort of nonintentional relation to what they represent — is not useful in explaining how language is learned or understood.” — Richard Rorty

“Three passions have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” — Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.” — George Eliot, Adam Bede

“The sound of a horn brought forth by an angry driver. First one small burp, then two more in quick succession, followed by the long, steady shout of total infuriation.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/the-so...

“Prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them… and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists.” — Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist