All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“A crossroad is a holy place. There, the pilgrim has to make a decision. That is why thegods usually sleep and eat at crossroads. Where roads cross, two great forces are concentrated -thepath that will be chosen, and the path to be ignored. Both are transformed into a single path, but only fora short period of time. The pilgrim may rest, sleep a bit, and even consult with the gods that inhabit thecrossroad. But no one can remain there forever: once his choice is made, he has to move on, withoutthinking about the path he has rejected. Otherwise, the crossroad becomes a curse.”

“For over a century and a half, anarchists have been arguing that coercive, hierarchical organization (as embodied in government and corporations) is not equivalent to organization per se (which they regard as necessary), and that coercive organization should be replaced by decentralized, nonhierarchical organization based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. This is hardly a rejection of organization.”

“A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that ‘observes’ to reason that ‘acts’. That’s what critical.”

“There’s a kind of saying that you don’t understand its meaning, ‘I don’t believe it. It’s too crazy. I’m not going to accept it.’… You’ll have to accept it. It’s the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that’s the way it looks. You don’t like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can’t help it, okay? If I’m going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.”

“All that man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts. His suffering and happiness are evolved from within. As he thinks, so he is. As he continues to think, so he remains.”

“Abundance is not the absence of scarcity; it is the presence of abundant mentality.”

“See the world for what it is.BEAUTIFUL!”

“No crime is a means to an end. No crime can be rationalized.”

“Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?”

“But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, “After all, things cannot be otherwise,” only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation’s power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life’s storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author’s, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another’s table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.”―from_Journals_, Search for Personal Meaning”

“If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.”

“Division isn’t just a math’s problem.It’s also humanities!”

“Whenever a soul leaves the body a void is felt across the world..”

“If you don’t look. You can’t see.”

“In your name, the family name is at last because it’s the family name that lasts.”