philosophy53 quotes

Μὴ σικχαίνειν μηδὲ ἀπαυδᾶν μηδὲ ἀποδυσπετεῖν, εἰ μὴ καταπυκνοῦταί σοι τὸ ἀπὸ δογμάτων ὀρθῶν ἕκαστα πράσσειν· ἀλλὰ ἐκκρουσθέντα πάλιν ἐπανιέναι καὶ ἀσμενίζειν, εἰ τὰ πλείω ἀνθρωπικώτερα, καὶ φιλεῖν τοῦτο, ἐφ᾿ ὃ ἐπανέρχῃ.

“Do not be disgusted nor discouraged nor dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when you have failed return back again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which you return.”

Μηκέθ᾿ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ, οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα δεῖ, διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.

“Put an end once and for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.”

“As I have said elsewhere, a theory or a politics that cannot cope with contradiction, that denies the irrational, that tries to sanitize the erotic, fantastic components of human life cannot visualize an authentic end to domination, but only vacate the field.”

“A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.”

“As we have seen, these words we have half digested are the distillations of great questions that must be faced if one is to live a serious life: reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing.”

“If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist want to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history, or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the principle of science and philosophy.”

“Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause.”

“What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.”

“For it is common experience that, as in matters of passion small differences can be most irritating, so in matters of thought the study of differences based on common intentions is most stimulating.”

“If we are longing for ontological grandeur and uncompromising plumbing of that one and only thought, Being, then Parmenides will seem the primordial deep thinker in his blazing induction into ‘the steadfast heart of persuasive truth’ (Diels, Parmenides, 1, 1. 29). But if we are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos and aroused by Heraclitus’s unflinching heedfulness to that one Speaker, the Logos, then he will appear as the aboriginal penetrating observer in his solitary burrowing into the designs of the Wise Thing.”

“In fact, it is the easiest thing in the world to utter a verbal contradiction, though much harder to entertain a mental one. This is indeed an arresting fact of speech—that what logicians claim you cannot say, you can so easily utter.”

“It [the cosmos] is a realm constituted of oppositions, now stably locked together in a wrestler’s hold, now suddenly parted in a catastrophic transformation, as when fighters break apart and gain the distance to strike home. That is its genesis and its rule:

‘War is Father of all things, of all things King.’ (53)

Antagonisms are, once more, ultimate. Heraclitus can both see a world constituted of antitheses and enunciate it as orderly because the Logos not only drives everything apart into confronting terms that face each other in fixed measures, but it also, and even primarily, collects everything into a unity:

‘Out of everything one and out of one everything.’ (10)”

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν.

“Know thyself.”

“Human existence remains an enigma. The thinking species is destined to tragedy, in the sense that the questions it eternally poses never find a definitive answer. What is the answer to questions like: Why death? Why evil and conflict? What is justice? The deepest meaning of culture is to propose partial, provisional, or temporary answers to these queries. Man is the animal that interrogates his existence. The diversity of cultures characterizes humanity because humanity poses to itself questions that in their nature are finally unanswerable. Human existence, in other words, is an enigma, not a simple aporia, a ‘pathless’ condition. Human existence is not an impasse; rather, it opens up multiple ways to respond to these eternal questions. This is what creates those fissures, so hard to accept, between humans who are simultaneously alike in their common ‘tragic’ condition and different in the paths they tread as a consequence of such questioning. Only someone who had definitively resolved the enigma of human existence would have the right to unify and homogenize cultures. But this uncontested superman does not exist, even if during the past two centuries several have tried to personify him.”

“The soul is the part of us that recognizes the enigmas of existence, without actually knowing them. It recognizes that these enigmas convey meaning, but does not know what that meaning is. It is the part of us that accepts the awkward presence of unanswerable questions. In other words, it represents the conscious limit of the mind, the eye that remains open to the void.”

“I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unseen source and in its development an infinite subtlety; a ‘dome of many-colored glass,’ too complex for thought, much less for utterance.

And yet the thirst for unity draws me eternally on. To chart the wilderness of experience and history, to bring into focus the future, the unsteady light of the past, to bring into significance and purpose the chaos of sensation and desire, to discover the direction of life’s majestic stream and thereby in some measure, perhaps, to control its flow: this insatiable metaphysical lust is one of the noble aspects of our questioning race. Our grasp is greater than our reach; but therefore our reach is made greater than our grasp.”

“History is a predicament for man who must live in it. In order to act in history, he must seek to rise above it. He needs perspectives in terms of which to understand his situation, and timeless truths and values in terms of which to act in it. Yet the perspectives which he finds often merely reflect his age; and what he accepts as timelessly true and value is apt to be merely the opinion that is in fashion. Thus while man must always try to rise above his historical situation he succeeds at best only precariously.”

“A morality is not something above our daily existence that we bring to bear on our actions through an act of reflective effort; rather, it is a medium for conduct without which no action or utterance could take place. A morality does not somehow supervene on the primary or natural activity of desiring or instinctual gratification; it is a language within which the pursuit of any satisfaction takes place, a knowledge we are never without.”

“Science confines itself to the measurable or quantitative aspect of things and excludes what is not measurable, individual, or unique. History deals with the individual and the unique, but it is abstract because it postulates an objective series of facts and events wholly independent of the historian and it never arrives at a complete explanation of anything. And practical thinking is condemned to an endless ‘ought to be’ that never finds rest in a stable ‘is’.

The primary conclusion that follows from all this is that scientific, historical, and practical thinking have nothing to contribute to political philosophy, nor can they criticize its conclusions.”

“Real conversation is an undirected engagement in which one distinctive voice is not reduced to another (there is, Oakeshott said, no ‘symposiarch’ or ‘arbiter’,’ no mode of all the modes), and by means of which human being discovers and distinguishes itself from all other being. The conversational prospect is where a glorious realization of the inherent freedom of the human spirit can appear.”

“Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.

The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.”

“Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom.”

“When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even—rather we might say especially— with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption...But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?”

“Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί.”

“It must be seen clearly that war is the natural state of man. Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.”

“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”

“To God all is beautiful, good, and as it should be. Man must see things as either good or bad.”

Dὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.

“You cannot step twice into the same river.”

“The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement appear the only result of our must accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”

“Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies...”

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”

“The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.”

“Si el mundo es ilusión la pérdida del mundo es ilusión también.

If the world is an illusion, then the loss of the world is an illusion too.”

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

“Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hidden from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hidden from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their side of the question.”

“A human life is composed of performances, and each performance is a disclosure of a man’s beliefs about himself and the world and an exploit in self-enactment. He is what he becomes; he has a history but no ‘nature’. This history is not an evolutionary process or a teleological engagement; there is no ‘ultimate man’ hidden in the womb of time or prefigured in the characters who now walk the world.”

“What is furthest from our needs is that kings should be philosophers.”

“You must learn to see the secret language of nature and what it drives at: there is one path that drives for the production of a supreme specimen. It is the path that governs higher life; survival and reproduction are only side effects of this path. Life is at most basic, struggle for ownership of space.”

“Since it is above all the analytical attitude which predominates in philosophy, its latest disciples have everywhere been engaged in dissolving and decomposing. In physics, they have found nothing but objections to make to the author of nature. In metaphysics, they have found nothing but doubts and subtleties. Ethics and logic have provided them with nothing but harangues against the political order, against religious ideas and against the laws of property. They have aspired to nothing less than the reconstruction of everything, by means of a revolt against everything. And without remembering that they themselves are in the world, they have torn down the pillars that support the world.”

“I cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind, it cannot be long endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”

“If matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second article of my creed. To act, to compare, to choose are the operations of an active, thinking being, so this being exists. Where do you find him existing, you will say not merely in the revolving heavens nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but in the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that falls, and the leaf blown by the wind.”

“Show me any other creature on Earth who can make a fire and who can behold with admiration the sun. What! Can I observe and know all creatures and their relations; can I feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue; can I consider the universe and raise myself towards the hand that guides it; can I love good and perform it; and should I then liken myself to the beasts? Wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy which makes you like the beasts, or rather in vain do you seek to degrade yourself; your genius belies your principles, your kindly heart belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your powers proves their excellence in your own despite.”

“Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past that haunts us and serenity. Our reality is made up of our societies, of the emotion inspired by music, of the rich intertwined networks of the common knowledge that we have constructed together. All of this is part of the self-same ‘nature’ that we are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.”

...o δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ...

“…the unexamined life is not the life of a human being...”

“There are no ‘men-in-themselves’ such as the philosophers prattle about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personality type, who contend in battle with the given world and through or fail, while the universe moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life, and life in the true Nietzschean sense of a cruel, pitiless, relentless battle deriving from the Will to Power.”

“Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles. This inference is obviously compatible with the fact that clarity about these problems, the approach to them, and the suggested solutions differ more or less from thinker to thinker or from age to age.”

“For the recognition of universal principles forces man to judge the established order, or what is actual here and now, in the light of the natural or rational order; and what is actual here and now is more likely than not to fall short of the universal and unchangeable norm. The recognition of universal principles thus tends to prevent men from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting, the social order that fate has allotted to them. It tends to alienate them from their place on the earth. It tends to make them strangers, and even strangers on the earth.”

“For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.”

“Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’âme ouverte and l’âme close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love, and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and between alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and alienation from God. If we split these pairs of symbols, and hypostatize the poles of the tension as independent entities, we destroy the reality of existence as it has been experienced by the creators of the tensional symbolisms; we lose consciousness and intellect; we deform our humanity and reduce ourselves to a state of quiet despair or activist conformity to the age, of drug addiction or television watching, of hedonistic stupor or murderous possession of truth, of suffering from the absurdity of existence or indulgence in any divertissement (in Pascal’s sense) that promises to substitute as a value for reality lost. In the languages of Heraclitus and Plato: Dream life usurps the place of wake life”.”

“History is the world of experience abridged by the category of the past. Science is experience conceptualized quantitatively. Practice is experience abstracted in terms of will.”

“The philosopher takes the everyday concepts of life and uses them as apertures for the observation of experience.”