PHILOSOPHY
"Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose beliefs about the gods are dark"
"Philosophy has been studied for many centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything which is not in dispute".
"Do not draw the conclusion from your apprentice studies that you have nothing left to learn, but rather that you have infinitely more to learn."
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
"Only one need absorbs me: I must win clarity else I cannot live; I cannot bear life unless I can believe that I will achieve it."
"Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed."
"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical."
MAN
"Man is the measure of all things."
"Having seen a small part of life, swift to die, men rise and fly away like smoke, persuaded only of what each has met with as they are driven in every direction. Who then claims to find the whole?"
"Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature. Authors communicate with the world in some special and peculiar capacity; I am the first to do so with my whole being..."
"Man is naturally good..."
"All value that a man has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the state... No individual can step beyond it; he can separate himself certainly from other individuals but not from the Spirit of the People."
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
"When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so."
"Behold I teach you the superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness..."
"The most immediate, and for practical purposes, the most significant causes of every case of neurotic illness are to be found in factors arising from sexual life."
"Hell is other people."
"Man is condemned forever to be free."
GOOD/GOD
"This one thing is wisdom, to understand Logos as that which guides the world everywhere... There is a Logos that exists forever and is universal, but men fail to comprehend it. All things come about in accordance with this Logos."
"In the world of knowledge, the idea of the Good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of the light of this visible world, and the source of truth and reason in the intellectual."
The Prime Mover - "a living being, eternal, most good".
"The One as transcending Intellect, transcends knowing... Knowing is a unitary thing, but defined; the first is One, but undefined."
"The Logos made flesh"
"In God alone, essence (what He is) and existence (that he is) coincide."
"God is the nonhuman and transcendent first cause of all being."
"Ultimate beatitude consists in the vision of the divine essence."
"I am not, then, a necessary being. I am therefore neither eternal nor infinite. But I clearly see that there is in nature a necessary being, eternal and infinite."
"Whatever is, is in God."
"It follows that every soul is a world apart, independent of everything else except God."
"My systematic condensation of the true philosophy of history is summed up in this fundamental aphorism - Man becomes more and more religious... For 20 centuries, the West has been seeking a universal religion, no more able to abandon it than to establish it... The final religion demands as a necessary basis of human order, the entire subordination of man to Humanity."
"God is dead."
"The very meaning of the conception of God lies in those differences which must be made in our experience if the conception be true."
HOW BEST TO LIVE
"To be temperate is the greatest excellence. And wisdom is speaking the truth and acting with knowledge in accordance with nature."
"Virtue is knowledge."
"May I consider wisdom to be riches."
Socrates Part of a prayer at the end of Plato's "Phaedrus"
"And this very thing constitutes the virtue of the happy man and the smooth current of life - when all actions promote the harmony of the spirit dwelling in the individual man with the will of that which orders the universe."
"Assaults of adversity do not affect the spirit of a stalwart man. He maintains his poise and assimilates all that falls to his lot to his own complexion, for he is more potent than the external world. I do not maintain that he is insensible to externals, but that he overcomes them. Unperturbed and serene, he rises to meet every obstacle. All adversity he regards as exercise."
"If a good man had foreknowledge of what would happen, he would cooperate in his own sickness and death and mutilation, since he knows that these things are assigned to him according to the universal arrangement, and that the whole is superior to the part."
"Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into the elements, has no feeling and that which has no feeling is nothing to us."
"Man loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings." Epicurus "Sovran Maxims 2" in Diogenes Laertes X.135
"Love God, serve God and do what you will."
"The conduct of our lives is the true reflection of our thoughts."
"Love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with pleasure, and it is free from all pain..."
"Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a Universal Law of Nature."
"Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign... the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
METAPHYSICS
"It is both necessary to say and think that being is: for to be is possible, and nothingness is not possible."
"All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."
"The Mind seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed."
"My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many... with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined in sufficient detail, leads to even more absurd results that the hypothesis of the One."
"I am. I exist - that is certain; but for how long do I exist? For as long as I think; for it might perhaps happen, if I totally ceased thinking, that I would, at the same time, cease to be."
"To be is to be perceived."
"Mind is the law-giver to nature."
"My philosophy is the first which has come to place the essence of man, not in consciousness, but in the will, which is not necessarily linked with consciousness."
"The mind and only the mind is a being in itself and for itself; it is autonomous and capable of being handled in a rational, genuinely and thoroughly scientific way... Thus the science of nature presupposes the science of the mind."
"The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunts our being."
METHOD (OR MADNESS?)
"Achilles can never overtake the tortoise..."
"If you do not expect the unexpected you will not discover it; for it cannot be tracked down and offers no passage."
"All scientific truths are necessarily and universally true and deal with the general not the particular. Human knowledge of these scientific truths is based on repeated sense experiences which reason allows a universal to form in the mind."
"Confirmation of scientific truths requires the use of incontestable forms of argument. A small class of logically valid arguments, the categorical syllogisms, can be used to confirm the truth of scientific propositions."
"But come, observe with every device in the way in which each thing is clear: neither hold sight higher in trust than hearing or resounding hearing above the clarities of tongue, nor let any of the other limbs by which thought has a way be deprived of trust, but think in the way in which each thing is clear."
"I made strenuous efforts on behalf of the preservation of the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God defeated me."
"I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was as false as the figments of my dreams."
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
"As the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give this science itself must be laid on experience and observation."
"All that we know comes from sense experience, and from reflection upon experience."
"Appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things-in-themselves... time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations as existing by themselves..."
"Each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes through three different theoretical conditions: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, the scientific or positive. This fundamental law should henceforth be, in my opinion, the starting point of all philosophical researches about man and society."
"The mind and only the mind is a being in itself and for itself; it is autonomous and capable of being handled in a rational, genuinely and thoroughly scientific way... Thus the science of nature presupposes the science of the mind."
"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, ie. the propositions of natural science - ie. something that has nothing to do with philosophy."
"The anthropologist goes forward, seeking to attain, through the conscious, of which he is always aware, more and more of the unconscious."
"Such is how I view myself, a traveller, an archaeologist of space, trying in vain to restore the exotic."
MISCELLANEOUS
"No society, no cohabitation can be pleasant or lasting without folly..."
"The truth can be spoken only by one who rests in it."
"The first thing travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, which we have thrown in the face of humanity."
"Consent is both the origin and the limit of power."
Empedocles Quoted in Clement "Miscellanies" V xiv 140.5
Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy"
Blaise Pascal "The Wager" 444
Marx "Theses on Feuerbach"
Martin Heidegger "Being and Time"
Husserl "The Crisis of the European Sciences and and Transcendental Phenomenology"
Theodor Adorno "Negative Dialectics"
Wittgenstein "Tractatus 4.003"
Protagoras "Truth"
Empedocles B 2.1-8 Quoted in Sextus Empiricus "Against the Mathematicians" VII 122
Montaigne "Essays" Book III. 2
Rousseau "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality"
Hegel "Reason in History"
Marx "The Communist Manifesto"
Nietzsche "Daybreak"
Nietzsche "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (I Prologue 3)
Freud "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses"
Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre "Age of Reason"
Heracleitus quoted in Diogenes Laertes
Plato "Republic"
Aristotle "Metaphysics"
Plotinus "Enneads"
Augustine "Confessions" 7.20
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Ibn Rushd "The Incoherence of the Incoherence"
St Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologica"
Blaise Pascal "The Wager" 443
Baruch Spinoza "Ethics"
Gottfried Leibniz Letter to Arnauld
Comte "Cours de Philosophie Positive"
Nietzsche "The Gay Science"
William James "The Will to Believe"
Heracleitus B112 quoted in the Anthology of John Stobeaus
Socrates in Platošs "Apology"
Chrysippus (a disciple of Zeno)
Seneca "On Providence"
Marcus Aurelius "Meditations"
Epicurus "Sovran Maxims 2" in Diogenes Laertes X.139
St Augustine
Montaigne "Essays"
Spinoza "Ethics - Treatise on the Correction of Understanding"
Kant "Critique of Practical Reason"
John Stuart Mill "On Liberty"
Parmenides "The Way of Truth" (Fr 6)
Heracleitus (Diogenes Laertius IX. 8,9)
Aristotle (408 b 18)
Zeno in Plato's Dialogue "Parmenides"
Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy"
George Berkeley "Three Dialogues"
Kant "Critique of Pure Reason"
Arthur Schopenhauer "The World as Will and Representation", Vol.2, section 18.
Edmund Husserl "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man"
Sartre "Being and Nothingness"
Attributed to Parmenides
Heracleitus B18 quoted in Clement "Miscellanies" II iv 17-8)
Aristotle "Posterior Analytics"
Aristotle "Prior Analytics"
Empedocles B 2.1-8 Quoted in Sextus Empiricus "Against the Mathematicians" VII 125
Augustine "Confessions Book 8"
Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy"
Francis Bacon "The Great Instauration"
David Hume Introduction to "A Treatise of Human Nature"
John Locke "Essay Concerning Human Understanding"
Kant "Critique of Pure Reason" A 369
Comte "Cours de Philosophie Positive"
Edmund Husserl "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man"
Ludwig Wittgenstein "Tractatus"
Claude Lévi-Strauss in introduction to "Structural Anthropology"
Claude Lévi-Strauss "Tristes Tropiques" 44
Erasmus "Praise of Folly"
Ludwig Wittgenstein "Notebooks"
Claude Lévi-Strauss "Tristes Tropiques" 38
Claude Lévi-Strauss "Tristes Tropiques"