“The most dangerous temptation: to be like nothing at all.” — Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1942

“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; (1/2)

“The more we use language, the more we find ourselves trapped inside it, unable to find the words to express what we want to say and unable to communicate our meaning to others. To escape this prison, we write poems — tricks of language that indicate the thing in question without ever naming it.”

“If you think in terms of one year, plant rice; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of one hundred years, teach the people.” — Guan Zhong, Guanzi

“The universe is wider than our views of it.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Bobok"

“Everything seems to be pushing you towards conformity. Bribing you to take the path of least resistance. Asking you to accept the world just as it is. Everyone tells you that if you just go along with the way they do things, then you'll have a happy and pleasant life.”

“Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself... Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote...” — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

“Know when to put something aside. One of life’s great lessons lies in knowing how to refuse, and it is even more important to refuse yourself, both to business and to others.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“Language is based on agreement. You and I can communicate only insofar as we agree on the meanings of the words we use. If I use a word that has no recognizable meaning for you, then I will not communicate anything at all, since for you it will be literal nonsense.”

“Human life, or anyway, adult human life, is pervaded through and through with obligation. It consists of things like doing our jobs, helping our friends, and living up to our roles as teachers, citizens, neighbours, parents, and so forth. ... (1/2)

“Few evils are less accessible to the force of reason, or more tenacious of life and power, than a long-standing prejudice.” — Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line (1881)"

“The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

“We become so focused on measuring and optimizing, on increasing efficiency and productivity, that we stop thinking about what is happening to us in our day-to-day lives. It is perhaps not surprising that we then feel there is something missing—as though life is not going as well as it ought to be…”

“We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. [...] But in the second case, how can one explain the expression, communicate what one understands? (1/2)

“Just as one bird does not make a flock, nor one day a season, so one action or a short time cannot make us happy.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend, in adversity nothing is so difficult.” — Epictetus, Fragments

“When wrongdoing happens, there is almost never only one person at fault. Responsibility is rarely singular and rarely clear. Part of being responsible is recognizing this lack of clarity.”

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.” — George Eliot, Adam Bede

“Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.” — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.” — Simone Weil, “Human Personality”

“The task of creation is always unfinished. From every newly crafted thing, a new arrangement of meanings emerges, and from that, new possibilities appear. New possibilities beget new questions, and something further must be created in response.”

“What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. (1/2)

“We have little to say when vanity is not making us speak.” — François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

“Faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the last spark of reason!” — Baruch Spinoza

“We can be physically stationary and still moving. Sitting in quiet reflection does not mean you are not moving. Real movement is change. It is vital, it is transformational, and it means growth. False movement is repetition. It is mechanical, it is sameness, and it means stagnation.”

“Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection.” — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it.” — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

“Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.” — R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

“If I rush to judge everything I see, then I cut myself off from the opportunity to experience it fully. I have to open myself up and allow everything in as it is. I have to be sensitive to nuances and complexities. I have to allow myself to see even those things I judge to be bad or wrong or ugly.”

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.” — Henry David Thoreau, Journals

“Nothing is in its origins more contemptible and in its consequences more hideous than the fear of ridicule.” — Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments

“Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“A language without rules could not communicate anything at all. It is because you and I agree on the rules of grammar that you can read this sentence and it has a meaning for you.”

“Worth lies within yourself, and no external shift will cause it to be lost. And since the ten thousand transformations continue without even the beginning of an end, how could they be enough to bring anxiety to your mind?” — Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, Watson tr. (Ch 21)

“We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.” — Voltaire, Notebooks

“Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony

“You obscure your “I” by speaking in a voice that pretends to come from nowhere. “The sky is blue,” you say. There is no “I” here. Your sentence claims to report an observation about the world with no reference to an observer.”

“It is easier to throw a hundred men, ninety-seven of whom are innocent, into prison, than to discover the three culprits who are hidden among them... That is why it is incumbent upon ethics not to follow the line of least resistance; (1/2)

“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercise their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.” — Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“An artwork usually does not come with an announcement or declaration that it is complete. The audience assumes the work must be complete because it is on display. But what if someone were to show a work that was purposely unfinished?”

“As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. Here, the body has lost its magic. It is covered over, and hidden under shapeless skins. (1/2)

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” — William James, “Letter to Helen Keller, 1908”

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” — Laozi, Daodejing, Feng & English tr. (Ch 1)

“The most important thing is not to give up. You have to keep observing, absorbing everything that happens, leaving nothing out. You have to keep asking questions and pushing your investigation of yourself and the world further, without end.”

“One who is truly a man should stop thinking about how long he will live. He should not be attached to life but should commit these concerns to the god and believe the women who say that not one single person can escape fate. (1/2)

“If you do not desire many things, a little will seem much to you; for small desires make poverty as strong as wealth.” — Democritus, Fragments, B284

“Remembering is like constructing and then traveling again through a space. We are already talking about architecture. Memories are built as a city is built.” — Umberto Eco, "Architecture and Memory"