on love aesthetics
“If there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts”
— (Anna Karenina), Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina↳ journal/anna-karenina
on love aesthetics
“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve”
— (the priest), Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms↳ journal/a-farewell-to-arms
on love aesthetics
“It’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on love aesthetics
“In certain cases, it is more honorable to yield to some passion, however unwise, if it springs from great love, than not to yield to it at all”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on love aesthetics
“True love is as luminous as the dawn and as silent as the tomb”
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables↳ journal/les-miserables
on love aesthetics
“Once upon a time there was a fairy who created the fields and forests specially for those in love. Hence the eternal truancy of lovers, who are forever escaping to the countryside and will go on doing so long as lovers and countrysides continue to exist. And the little shrieks, the chasing through the grass, the chance to put an arm around a waist, those sweet nothings that are music to the ear, the adoration declared in the way a single syllable is uttered, those cherries plucked from one mouth to another – all this becomes part of the coruscating heavenly radiance. Beautiful young women are sweetly lavish of themselves. They think this will never end”
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables↳ journal/les-miserables
on love aesthetics
“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.”
— (Amory Blaine), F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
on love aesthetics
“All love is secretive, even the faithless kind, if it has the appropriate aesthetic element within it”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on love aesthetics
“To love is beautiful only as long as resistance is present; as soon as it ceases, to love is weakness and habit”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on love aesthetics
“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer [from lovesickness] all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera↳ journal/love-in-the-time-of-cholera
on love aesthetics
“He was not the kind of man she would have chosen. His foundling’s eyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera↳ journal/love-in-the-time-of-cholera
on love aesthetics
“One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera↳ journal/love-in-the-time-of-cholera
on love aesthetics
”It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not”
— (Fermina Daza), Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera↳ journal/love-in-the-time-of-cholera
on love aesthetics
”A characteristic of true love is its enduring resemblance to childhood: in both are found the same heedlessness, imprudence, prodigality, laughter and tears”
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on love aesthetics
“Love soon passes, but like a mischievous urchin, likes to leave a trail of devastation to mark its passing”
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on love aesthetics
“Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love”
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles↳ journal/tess-of-the-durbervilles
on secrecy aesthetics
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now, I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life”
— (Basil), Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray↳ journal/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
on passion aesthetics
”[The penis] is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera↳ journal/love-in-the-time-of-cholera
on passion aesthetics
“The human heart is like a night bird silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage↳ journal/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
on passion aesthetics
“Why rant against the passions? Aren’t they the only beautiful thing on earth, the source of heroism, enthusiasm, poetry, music, the arts – everything, in fact?”
— (Rodolphe), Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on passion aesthetics
“Coldness in mistresses is most painful, but in very truth compliance and availability are even more so; that is because the yearning which is born in us from the high opinion in which we hold the object of our love sharpens our love, and the choler similarly makes it hot; but satiety engenders a feeling of insipidness; our passions then is blunted, hesitant, weary and half-asleep”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)↳ journal/essays
on passion aesthetics
“This is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now – tell her and take her away. Neither of you know it, but far away over the night [the other man] has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon↳ journal/the-love-of-the-last-tycoon
on vivacity aesthetics
“High over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”
— (Nick Carraway), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on fickleness aesthetics
“Although it is not commonly admitted that feelings are subject to sudden changes, it is certain that two people in love often move apart more quickly than they have come together”
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on poignance aesthetics
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye… At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life”
— (Nick Carraway), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on beauty aesthetics
“There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses – bound for dust – mortal”
— (Gloria Gilbert), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned↳ journal/the-beautiful-and-damned
on beauty aesthetics
“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned↳ journal/the-beautiful-and-damned
on beauty aesthetics
“Like the sun, things of beauty rise and set. At their rise they have their first beginning; they grow until they reach perfection; but once they have reached it, they grow old and die. The faster they climb towards the zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions↳ journal/confessions
on beauty aesthetics
“The struggle and inequality are present even in beauty. How divinely vaults and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers – with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on beauty aesthetics
“What’s shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart”
— (Dmitri Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on beauty aesthetics
“All opposition enhances a person’s beauty”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on beauty aesthetics
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade”
— (Anna Karenina), Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina↳ journal/anna-karenina
on beauty aesthetics
“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it”
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina↳ journal/anna-karenina
on beauty aesthetics
“Our lives are like a complex musical score, filled with all sorts of cryptic writing. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage↳ journal/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
on beauty aesthetics
“Love is the striving to establish friendship on the external signs of beauty”
— Cicero
on modesty aesthetics
“What is the purpose of that artful maidenly modesty, that poised coldness, that severe countenance, that professed ignorance of things they know better than we do who are teaching them to them, if not to increase our desire to vanquish, overcome, and bend to our passion all those conventional obstacles? For there is not only pleasure in making that sweet gentleness and that girlish modesty go mad with sensual desire but glory as well as in reducing a proud and imperious gravity to the mercy of our ardor”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)↳ journal/essays
on modesty aesthetics
“Women’s discussions on duty, the proprieties and religion are as it were fortresses which they like to see taken by storm”
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on courtship aesthetics
“They’re going to sleep together. They know it … Since love is a great poetic thing which you must not frighten away, several times a week they go to dances and restaurants, offering the spectacle of their ritual, mechanical dances … Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on courtship aesthetics
“Enjoy the marks of her favor and women will dote on you. Her rivals, her friends, her closest friends will try to take you away from her. There are women who love the man someone else has chosen, just as there are poor middle-class women who hope to acquire our manners by copying our hats”
— (Beauséant), Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on infatuation aesthetics
“I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love! If it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away”
— (Elizabeth Bennet), Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice↳ journal/pride-and-prejudice
on novelty aesthetics
“Emma was like all other mistresses, and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on jealousy aesthetics
“Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. The prison was, after all, his own heart”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage↳ journal/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
on infidelity aesthetics
“What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot; that is all one can say”
— (Henry Wotton), Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray↳ journal/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
on betrayal aesthetics
“True love was paying the price for false love. Such misunderstandings will unfortunately continue to multiply for as long as men fail to realize how many flowers in a young woman’s heart are trampled flat by the first onrush of betrayal”
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on disenchantment aesthetics
“His [sexual conquests], like children in a schoolyard, had so trampled his heart that nothing green now grew there, and whatever passed that way, more heedless than the children, left behind not even its name”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on shame aesthetics
“One can only convert love into a device for making a fortune by draining the cup of shame to the dregs and renouncing all the noble ideals which serve to absolve the faults of youth”
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on artistic frailty aesthetics
“A single cavity, one aching shoulder, and the beautiful vision and sound I hoped to convey goes out the window”
— (Midorikawa), Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage↳ journal/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
on inexpressibility aesthetics
“None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a crooked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on inexpressibility aesthetics
“Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on aesthetic recollection aesthetics
“Recollection is a means not only for conserving but also of augmenting; something that is permeated by recollection has a double effect”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on dance aesthetics
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice↳ journal/pride-and-prejudice
on art aesthetics
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying hard to be one person”
— (Cecelia), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon↳ journal/the-love-of-the-last-tycoon
on art aesthetics
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter”
— (Basil), Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray↳ journal/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
on artifice aesthetics
“Is insincerity such a terrible thing? It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray↳ journal/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
on photography aesthetics
“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure over another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. This very passivity of the photographic record is photography’s ‘message’, its aggression”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography and death aesthetics
“All photographs are memento mori. By slicing out a moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography and death aesthetics
“Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those whom desirability is enhanced by distance”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography and social class aesthetics
“Seen from the middle-class perspective of photography, celebrities are as intriguing as pariahs”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography and painting aesthetics
“By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation – abstraction”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“The urge to have new experiences is translated into the urge to take photographs: experience seeking a crisis-proof form”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography↳ journal/on-photography
on photography aesthetics
“Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling”
— Franz Kafka
on boldness power
“Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent – thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on boldness power
“The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit - which compels us to be strong”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on boldness power
“All sublime conquests are more or less prizes for audacity. For the [French] Revolution to happen it is not enough that Montesquieu should anticipate it, Diderot advocate it, Beaumarchais announce it, Condorcet calculate it, Arouet pave the way for it, Rousseau design it. Danton had to dare it”
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables↳ journal/les-miserables
on power power
“Pretend you’re in complete control and people will assume you are”
— Nolan Bushnell to Steve Jobs
on power power
“Power resides where men believe it resides”
— George R. R. Martin
on power power
“As men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on power power
“The Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily, from the profoundest shrewdness in self-preservation, took the side of all decadence instincts - not as being dominated by them but because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against ‘the world’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on control power
“Real effective subordination only concerns those who welcome it and who love to gain honor and wealth by such servitude; the man who is content to squat by his hearth and who knows how to govern his household without squabbles or law-suits is as free as the Duke of Venice”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:42)↳ journal/essays
on control power
“The Romans from the earliest of times have been accustomed to leave kings whom they have vanquished in the possession of their kingdoms but under their authority, so that they might have even kings as tools of servitude”
— Tacitus, Agricola
on trust power
“For a life ambitious for fame, a man must, on the contrary, yield little to suspicions and keep them on a tight rein; fear and distrust attract hostile actions: it invites them”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.24)↳ journal/essays
on fear power
“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable”
— Eric Hoffer
on struggle power
“Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on desperation power
“Necessity is the last and best of all weapons”
— Titus Livy
on decisions power
“You should consider what is to be done rather than what is to be said. It will be easy when you have arrived at a decision, to accommodate words to acts”
— Lucius Annius
on humility vs. arrogance power
“Humility is not only of no help, but is a hindrance, especially when used in dealing with arrogant men who either out of envy or for some other cause, have come to hate you”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on justice power
“No well-ordered republic allows the demerits of its citizens to be cancelled out by their merits”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on honesty power
“Each rung of fortune’s ladder which brings us up in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more wary of offending those whose friendship is most useful and enmity most dangerous. Telling the truth is useful to the hearer but harmful to those who tell it”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on laws power
“[Princes] begin to lose their state the moment they begin to break the laws and to disregard the ancient traditions and customs under which men have long lived”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on governance power
“In every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class and that all legislation favorable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on mobs power
“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on mobs power
“The restless minds of the plebs cause endless squabbles and trouble in a republic, and is enough to drive the nobility to desperate measures which in course of time have disastrous results”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on groups power
“If the populace makes mistakes about generalities, it does not make mistakes about particulars”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on groups power
“Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless”
— (Fyodor Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on groups power
“The world isn’t that easily turned upside down. It’s people who are turned upside down”
— (Haida), Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage↳ journal/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
on groups power
“Those ‘savages’ are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage… It is not sensible that artifice should be reverenced more than Nature, our great and powerful Mother”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:31)↳ journal/essays
on capital power
“The worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labor power, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence”
— Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on capital power
“The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract”
— Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on capital power
“It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. It creates a world after its own image”
— Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on religious rhetoric power
“Many benefits of which a prudent man is aware, are not so evident to reason that he can convince others of them. Hence wise men, in order to escape this difficulty, have recourse to God”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on inheritance of power power
“All the [Roman] emperors who acquired imperial power by inheritance were bad men, with the exception of Titus; those who acquired it through adoption, were all good, like the five counting from Nerva to Marcus; and when it fell to their heirs a period of decadence again ensued”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on paradox of getting and using power power
“Very rarely will there be found a good man ready to use bad methods in order to make himself a prince, though with a good end in view, nor yet a bad man who, having become a prince, is ready to do the right thing and to whose mind it will occur to use well that authority which he has acquired by bad means”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on offending power
“It is necessary, therefore, either never to injure anyone, or to inflict the injuries at one go, and then to reassure men and give them ground to expect peace and security”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on wickedness power
“Wickedness is sweet: everyone denounces it, but everyone lives in it, only they all do it on the sly and I do it openly”
— (Fyodor Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on exploitation power
“Jim Crow and mass incarceration were born, in part, due to a desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities, and racial biases of poor and working-class whites for political or economic gain”
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow↳ journal/the-new-jim-crow
on peacemaking power
“If you wish to play peace-maker, seat adversaries next each other where they must begin by playing civil”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on unpopular stances power
“Danger is incurred only when many have opposed you, and the result being unfortunate, they combine to bring about your downfall”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on war power
“The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War↳ journal/the-art-of-war
on equality power
“‘Sympathy for all’ – would be harshness and tyranny for thee, my good neighbor!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on the legal system power
“If you pay enough money, if you say the right things, if you take enough time to weaken and dilute the truth, the sun could slowly begin to look like an egg. Not only was this possible, it happens all the time”
— Chanel Miller, Know My Name↳ journal/know-my-name
on corruption power
“Do you know the way to [become successful] here? Through brilliant intelligence or skillful corruption. Men yield to the power of intelligence, though they hate it and try to decry it, because it takes but does not share. But they yield if it is persistent. In a word they kneel before it in worship once they have failed to bury it in the mud. Corruption thrives, talent is rare, so corruption is the weapon of the mediocre majority, and you will feel it pricking you wherever you go”
— (Vautrin), Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on corruption power
“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury”
— Cato the Elder
on adaptability conduct
“The superior man does not fear change”
— Confucius
on judgment conduct
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you had”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on habit conduct
“We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and strain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present before us”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on mortality conduct
“You’ve lived as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred—what’s the difference? The laws make no distinction. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in—why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor: “But I’ve only gotten through three acts . . . !” Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations↳ journal/meditations
on mortality conduct
“One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaä – blessing it rather than in love with it”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on mortality conduct
”’Natural’ death is death for the most contemptible of reasons, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward’s death. From love of life one ought to desire to die differently from this: freely, consciously, not accidentally, not suddenly overtaken”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on mortality conduct
“Like the hour I must be here and like an hour pass away”
— Epictetus, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-fragments-manual
on mortality conduct
“You are a little soul, carrying a corpse”
— Epictetus, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-fragments-manual
on mortality conduct
“While we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on mortality conduct
“All good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on mortality conduct
“It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls”
— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on mortality conduct
“She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say: “It is the —th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died”; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year”
— (Tess), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles↳ journal/tess-of-the-durbervilles
on busyness conduct
“Beware of the barrenness of a busy life”
— Socrates
on busyness conduct
“The most ludicrous of all ludicrous things, it seems to me, is to be busy in the world… What, after all, do these busy bustlers achieve? Are they not just like the woman who, in a flurry because the house was on fire, rescued the fire tongs? What more, after all, do they salvage from life’s huge conflagration?”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on money conduct
“Cheap people avoid spending on important things. Frugal people avoid spending on unimportant things.”
— x
on urbanity conduct
“Cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on ambition conduct
“In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on ambition conduct
“Being rich makes me sweat a lot more, it makes me embarrassed and guilty – it’s much more fun being the aspirant, because once you have gotten there, even if you are just there temporarily, you’re in a position of defending or protecting rather than aspiring or building”
— Gail Sheehy
on work conduct
”An action compelled by the instinct of life has in the joy of performing it the proof it is a right action: and that nihilist with Christian-dogmatic bowels understands joy as an objection… What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? As an automaton of ‘duty’?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on work conduct
“We see how slow men are to act when they think they have time, and how quick to act when the need becomes urgent”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on work conduct
“Such, obviously, was the stuff of life – a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their own eventual success”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned↳ journal/the-beautiful-and-damned
on technical work conduct
“It was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom – so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned↳ journal/the-beautiful-and-damned
on pedantries conduct
“Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water”
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air↳ journal/when-breath-becomes-air
on anxiety conduct
“In times of anxiety it is critical to avoid being idle. Business and conversation of friends were necessary to give the mind rest from that intensity of thought, which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death”
— Abraham Lincoln
on diversion conduct
“Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories. I delight in coming across a general in the field, at the foot of a breach which he means soon to attack, giving himself whole-heartedly to his dinner while chatting freely with his friends, or across Brutus, with heaven and earth conspiring against him and the liberty of Rome, stealing an evening hour from his rounds of duty to jot down notes on his Polybius as he read him with complete composure. It is for petty souls overwhelmed by the weight of affairs to be unable to disentangle themselves from them completely, not knowing how to drop them and take them up again”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.13)↳ journal/essays
on diversion conduct
“Some painful idea gets hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solaces it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.4)↳ journal/essays
on diversion conduct
“The most insignificant thing can accidentally become a rich material for amusement”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on diversion conduct
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on diversion conduct
“What men are reproached for pursuing so eagerly something that could never satisfy them, their proper answer, if they really thought about it, ought to be that they simply want a violent and vigorous occupation to take their minds off themselves, and that is why they choose some attractive object to entice them in ardent pursuit. Their opponents could find no answer to that”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on diversion conduct
“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that”
— (Jake Barnes), Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises↳ journal/the-sun-also-rises
on gambling conduct
“Part of what makes the Las Vegas world of gambling so addictive is the brilliant ways in which people are manipulated into thinking that the environment is a benign, rather than malevolent, one—the belief that the outcome is likely to be a good one, especially for someone as lucky and special as you…so long as you keep putting in those coins and pressing that lever”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers↳ journal/why-zebras-dont-get-ulcers
on addiction conduct
“The stranglehold of addiction is when it is no longer the issue of how good the drug feels, but how bad its absence feels”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers↳ journal/why-zebras-dont-get-ulcers
on enjoyment of work conduct
“The fruit of labor is sweeter than that of windfall”
— x
on honeymoons conduct
“Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together, but it soon turns into working day”
— (Caleb Garth), George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on instinct conduct
“To have to combat one’s instincts - that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on happiness conduct
“Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day”
— Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography-franklin
on happiness conduct
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. Being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand”
— (Mustapha Mond), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World↳ journal/brave-new-world-brave-new-world-revisited
on happiness conduct
“Joy, in the minute that follows the first, is less lively; in the third minute it becomes still weaker, and finally it merges imperceptibly with one’s usual state of mind, as a ring in the water, born of a stone’s fall, finally merges with the smooth surface”
— Nikolai Gogol, The Nose↳ journal/selected-short-stories
on happiness conduct
“The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so; in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.14)↳ journal/essays
on happiness conduct
“Our happiness will always lie between the soles of our feet and the crown of our head”
— (Bianchon), Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on kindness conduct
“At moments, the young man would remember the belittled clerk’s penetrating words: ‘let me be. Why do you offend me?’ – and in these penetrating words rang other words: ‘I am your brother’. Many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in men, how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! Even in a man the world regards as noble and honorable”
— Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat↳ journal/selected-short-stories
on virtue conduct
“A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is a danger”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on society conduct
“The world, which grovels before money or glory, will not bow down before happiness or virtue”
— (Esther), Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low↳ journal/a-harlot-high-and-low
on nobility conduct
”Noble souls cannot stay long in this world. Indeed, how could deep feelings keep company with such a mean, petty, superficial society?”
— (Eugène), Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on fraternity and constancy conduct
“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.1)↳ journal/essays
on giving conduct
“Scattering your seed, in offering charity, in performing your good deed in whatever fashion it may be, you give away part of your personality and take in part of another’s; there is a mutual communion, and with a little more attention you will be rewarded by knowledge, the most unexpected discoveries… All the seeds you have broadcast, perhaps already forgotten, will take root and flourish; he who received it from you will pass it to another”
— (Ippolit), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot↳ journal/the-idiot
on forgiveness conduct
“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals↳ journal/the-genealogy-of-morals
on duty conduct
“If you want to be happy, monsieur, you must never understand duty. For once you’ve understood, it’s implacable. You’d almost think it punishes you for understanding, but no, it rewards you. For it places you in a hell where you sense God at your side. You’ve no sooner torn yourself apart than you’re at peace with yourself”
— (Jean Valjean), Victor Hugo, Les Misérables↳ journal/les-miserables
on pleasure conduct
“To be accustomed to simple and plain livings … makes us more ready for the enjoyment of luxury if at intervals we chance to meet with it, and it renders us fearless against misfortune”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure conduct
“By pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure conduct
“As one does not choose the food that is in most quantity but that which is most pleasant, so he does not seek the enjoyment of the longest life but of the happiest”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure conduct
“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess; but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:39)↳ journal/essays
on pleasure and reason conduct
“A pleasant life is produced by the reason which is sober, which examines the motive for every choice and rejection, and which drives away all those opinions through which the greatest tumult lays hold of the mind”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure and reason conduct
“The mind attains its utmost pleasure in reflecting on the very things that used to cause the greatest mental fears and on things like them”
— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure and friends conduct
“Of the things that wisdom prepares for insuring lifelong happiness, by far the greatest is the possession of friends”
— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on pleasure and death conduct
“The true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy … by taking away the desire for immortality”
— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on want conduct
“One’s own free and voluntary wanting, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness – all this is the same most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil”
— (Underground Man), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground↳ journal/notes-from-underground
on want conduct
“There were moments, after prolonged suffering, where Ivan Ilyich wanted most of all, however embarrassed he would have been to admit it, to be pitied by someone like a sick child. He wanted to be caressed, kissed, wept over, as children are caressed and comforted… Ivan Ilyich wanted to weep, wanted to be caressed and wept over, and then comes his colleague, the judge Shebek, and instead of weeping and caressing, Ivan Ilyich makes a serious, stern, profoundly thoughtful face and, by inertia, gives his opinion on the significance of a decision of the appeals court and stubbornly insists on it. This lie around and within him poisoned most of all the last days of Ivan Ilyich’s life”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on suffering conduct
“I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love’”
— (Zosima), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on luxury conduct
“Natural wealth is easily obtained; the wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond reach”
— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on gratitude conduct
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for”
— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on gratitude conduct
“ The thankless nature of the soul makes the creature endlessly greedy of changes in its way of life”
— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on fortune conduct
“Alas, fortune’s door does not open inward so that one can push it open by rushing at it; but it opens outward, and therefore one can do nothing about it”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on fortune conduct
“In this world’s activities we often notice that Fortune rivals Virtue: she shows us what power she has over everything and delights in striking down our presumption by making the incompetent lucky since she cannot make them wise”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.8)↳ journal/essays
on luck conduct
“O heaven over me, pure and high! Chance, that is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on serendipity conduct
“Upon trifles the best gifts of the gods often hang”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on trifles conduct
“Men of action should learn to laugh at and enjoy small annoyances, or they themselves may become ‘small’”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on trifles conduct
“Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on depression conduct
“My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known – no wonder, then, that I return the love”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on despair conduct
“Whatever you may think of life and its task, you will still be too chivalrous of mind about yourself to choose a career for that reason, for there is still the same falseness here as in marrying for that reason. What, then, is there to do? I have only one answer: Despair, then!”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on bitterness conduct
”Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on guilt conduct
“A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances; the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections, and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable cud in that way”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on regret conduct
“It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away - that they might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right… In the morning, when he saw the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor - their every movement, their every word confirmed the terrible truth revealed to him that night. In them he saw himself, all that he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was all not right, that it was a terrible, vast deception concealing both life and death”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on envy conduct
"It is not greed that drives the world, but envy"
— Warren Buffett
on vanity conduct
“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations↳ journal/meditations
on vanity conduct
“We do not care about our reputation in towns where we are only passing through. But when we have to stay some time we do care. How much time does it take? A time proportionate to our vain and paltry existence”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on pride conduct
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray↳ journal/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
on pride conduct
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on pride conduct
“Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye – and calls it his pride”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on desire conduct
“It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires”
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina↳ journal/anna-karenina
on desire conduct
“Men are not wrong to want excitement – if they only wanted it for the sake of diversion. The trouble is that they want it as though, once they had the things they seek, they could not fail to be truly happy. This is what justifies calling their search a vain one”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on strength conduct
“To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals↳ journal/the-genealogy-of-morals
on friendship conduct
“We show our feelings for friends not by wailing at their funerals, but by meditating on their lives”
— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on magnanimity conduct
“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on faith conduct
“He recognizes the impossibility and in the same moment he believes in the absurd”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling↳ journal/fear-and-trembling
on faith conduct
“I believed countless things which I had never seen or which had taken place when I was not there to see – so many events in the history of the world, so many facts about places and towns which I had never seen, and so much that I believed on the world of friends or doctors or various other people. Unless we took those things on trust, we should accomplish nothing in this life”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions↳ journal/confessions
on faith conduct
“A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last upper step to the most complete faith (he may or may not take that step), while the indifferent one has no faith, apart from a bad fear”
— (Tikhon), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons↳ journal/demons
on faith conduct
“If the laws of nature did not pity even Jesus, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil’s vaudeville. Why live then?”
— (Kirillov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons↳ journal/demons
on art conduct
“The youth looks at a picture painted on the wall, which ‘shows how Jupiter is said to have deceived the girl Danae by raining a golden shower into her lap’. These are the words with which he incites himself to lechery, as though he had heavenly authority for it. Filth is committed with greater confidence as a result of learning the words. They contain the wine of error which had already gone to the heads of the teachers who poured it out for us to drink. If we refused to drink, we were beaten for it, without the right to appeal to a sober judge”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions↳ journal/confessions
on wealth business
“The measure of wealth is then not labor time, but disposable time. Labor time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty”
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on wealth business
“It is not house and lands or piles of bronze and gold which banish fevers from their owner’s sickly body nor anxieties from his sickly mind. Their owner must be well if he wants to enjoy his acquisitions. When a man is full of fears or cravings, house and goods are as enjoyable as paintings are to blear eyes or hot fomentations to the gout”
— Horace, Epistles
on wealth business
“I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life”
— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs↳ journal/steve-jobs
on success business
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning↳ journal/mans-search-for-meaning
on success business
”Success, whether filched or merited, is what the pit applauds; the revolting tricks and dodges, the supernumeraries in their grease-paint, the hired clappers, the call-boys and scene-shifters, that’s what it’s not allowed to see”
— (Lousteau), Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on teaching business
“Men should be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown propos’d as things forgot”
— Jonathan Swift
on speaking business
“Make yourself perfectly at home before your audience, and simply talk to them”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on speaking business
“Never put a ‘but’ in the face of an angry person”
— Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication↳ journal/nonviolent-communication
on action business
“Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience
on servant leadership business
“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership”
— Nelson Mandela
on leadership business
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others”
— Jack Welch
on hiring business
“The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them. Whenever I had a lesser minister in charge, I invariably had to push and prod him, and later to review problems and clear roadblocks for him. The end result was never what could have been achieved. When I had the right man in charge, a burden was off my shoulders. I needed only to make clear the objectives to be achieved, the time-frame within which he must try to do it, and he would find a way to get it done”
— Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story↳ journal/the-singapore-story
on recognition business
“I believe the best preventive to quarrels to be the recognition of, and sincere interest in, the men, satisfying them that you really care for them and that you rejoice in their success”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on punishment business
“Only experience teaches the supreme force of gentleness. Light but certain punishment, when necessary, is most effective. Severe punishments are not needed and a judicious pardon, for the first offense at least, is often best of all”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on punishment business
“[Seneca notes that] punishments sharpen our vices rather than blunt them; they do not engender a concern to do good (which is the result of reason and self-discipline) but only a concern to not be found out doing wrong”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)↳ journal/essays
on transparency business
“All defects are lighter in the open. They are most pernicious when concealed beneath a pretense of soundness”
— Seneca
on leading others business
“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from such individuals that all human failures spring”
— Alfred Adler
on standards business
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain”
— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs↳ journal/steve-jobs
on inspiration business
“He who moulds public sentiments, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions”
— Abraham Lincoln
on motivation business
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to go to the forest to gather wood, saw it, and nail the planks together. Instead, teach them the desire for the sea”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
on motivation business
“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much”
— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs↳ journal/steve-jobs
on teaching business
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on speech business
“Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one’s emotions”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on commonality business
“However exalted great men may be, they still have some point of contact with the humblest of men. If they are greater than we, it is because their heads are higher up, but their feet are as low down as ours”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on listening business
“All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message. Behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being”
— Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication↳ journal/nonviolent-communication
on choosing people business
“The time quantum of the good personnel decision is amazingly large. What the decision involves often becomes clear only when one has gone around the same track several times”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on others business
“My success is not to be attributed to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than myself”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on celebration business
“Successful team efforts should end in celebration and ceremony – a gathering in which each member is recognized for his or her contribution, and the accomplishments of the entire group are placed in context and honored”
— John Hennessy, Leading Matters↳ journal/leading-matters
on persuasion business
“If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason”
— Ben Franklin
on persuasion business
“The best way to introduce a new idea is not with facts and figures, but with a story”
— John Hennessy, Leading Matters↳ journal/leading-matters
on creativity business
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat, that’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas”
— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs↳ journal/steve-jobs
on focus business
“Take a simple idea and take it seriously”
— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack↳ journal/poor-charlies-almanack
on focus business
“Nothing tells in the long run like good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the Stock Exchange”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on initiative business
“Executives are forced to keep on ‘operating’ unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on funding business
“If you want money, ask for advice”
on startups business
“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”
— Paul Graham
on customers business
“The greatest risk – and hence the greatest cause of failure – in startups is not the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets”
— Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany↳ journal/the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany
on validation business
“In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions”
— Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany↳ journal/the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany
on discipline business
“Wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when they’re hot and abandoning when they’re not”
— Ray Dalio, Principles↳ journal/principles-life-work
on operations efficiency business
“Behave all the time the way you would if business were bad. That is what it really means to make an operation more rational”
— Taiichi Ohno, Workplace Management↳ journal/workplace-management
on effective work business
“Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Nor is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on organization business
“The test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on organization business
“Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on frugality business
“The wonderful thing about poverty in youth when it is effective, is that it directs the will entirely to effort, and the soul entirely to aspirations”
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables↳ journal/les-miserables
on spending business
“The lower your bills, the lower your stress”
— Mark Cuban
on spending business
“There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means”
— Calvin Coolidge
on spending business
“Annual income, twenty pounds: annual expenditure, nineteen pounds; result, happiness. Annual income, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, twenty-one pounds; result, misery”
— (Micawber), Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
on greed business
“In the financial marketplace, you get what you pay for, if you’re careful. If you try to get more, you get burned”
— Andrew Tobias, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need↳ journal/the-only-investment-guide-youll-ever-need
on honesty business
“Ben Franklin was right for us. He didn’t say honesty was the best morals, he said it was the best policy”
— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack↳ journal/poor-charlies-almanack
on dishonesty business
“Annual reports are organized very simply. The good news is contained up front in the president’s message and the ensuing text; the bad news is contained in the footnotes to the financial statement”
— Andrew Tobias, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need↳ journal/the-only-investment-guide-youll-ever-need
on reputation business
“It is essential to permanent success that a house should obtain a reputation for being governed by what is fair rather than what is legal”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on negotiation business
“Conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people’s heads. Truth is simply one more argument for dealing with the difference”
— Ury, Fisher, Patton, Getting to Yes↳ journal/getting-to-yes
on negotiation business
“When one party to a bargain becomes excited, the other should keep cool and patient”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on negotiation business
“We do not hear ‘no’ as a rejection but rather as an expression of the need that is keeping the person from saying ‘yes’”
— Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication↳ journal/nonviolent-communication
on being likable business
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged”
— Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography-franklin
on facade business
“A resume is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed”
— Geoff Smart, Randy Street, Who: The A Method for Hiring↳ journal/who
on hubris business
“The losses men encounter during a business life which seriously embarrass them are rarely in their own business, but in enterprises of which the investor is not master”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on confrontation business
“Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite”
— Abraham Lincoln
on offenses business
“Wounds of self-esteem become incurable once oxide of silver gets into them”
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on conformity business
“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally”
— John Maynard Keynes
on diversity business
“To tolerate diversity, relationships must be task-focused rather than personality-focused”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive↳ journal/the-effective-executive
on leveraging network business
“The Romans always took care to have in new provinces some friend to act as a ladder up which to climb or a door by which to enter, or as a means whereby to hold it … people who observe such customs will be found to have less need of fortune than those who do not observe them well”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-on-livy
on trust business
“Credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again”
— Socrates
on individual liability business
“You may give money freely when you have a surplus, but your name never – neither as an endorser nor as a member of a corporation with individual liability”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on endorsement backings business
“The businessman has no rock more dangerous to encounter in his career than this very one of endorsing commercial paper. It can easily be avoided if he asks himself 2 questions: Have I surplus means for all possible requirements which will enable me to pay without inconvenience the utmost sum for which I am liable under this endorsement? Secondly: Am I willing to lose this sum for the friend for whom I endorse?”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on ideas business
“It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard. It’s getting rid of the old ones”
— John Maynard Keynes
on ideas business
“A single formula will generate a variety of ideas depending on how it is written”
— Taiichi Ohno, Workplace Management↳ journal/workplace-management
on education business
“Don’t let school get in the way of your education”
— Mark Twain
on struggle business
“The works of genius are watered with its tears. Talent is a living organism whose infancy, like that of all creatures, is liable to malady. Society rejects defective talent as Nature sweeps away weak or misshapen creatures. Whoever wishes to rise above the common level must be prepared for a great struggle and recoil before no obstacle. A great writer is just simply a martyr whom the stake cannot kill”
— (d’Arthez), Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on grit business
“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on grit business
“The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients”
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air↳ journal/when-breath-becomes-air
on grit business
“The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something”
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture↳ journal/the-last-lecture
on experience business
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted”
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture↳ journal/the-last-lecture
on engineering business
“Engineering isn’t about perfect solutions; it’s about doing the best you can with limited resources”
— Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons↳ journal/fathers-and-sons
on guilt business
“Thine own reproach alone do fear”
— Robert Burns
on truth philosophy
“Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then? Is there no ground for suspecting that all philosophers, insofar as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on untruth philosophy
“We are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on truth and untruth philosophy
“The moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance is the worst proved supposition in the world. There could have been no life at all except upon the basis of perspective estimates and semblances”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on relativism philosophy
In literature, every idea has its front and reverse side, and no one can presume to state which side is which. Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are two-sided. Janus is the tutelary deity of criticism and the symbol of genius”
— (Blondet), Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on bias philosophy
“The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on bias philosophy
“In the philosopher, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on bias philosophy
“Nobody keeps a record of their erroneous prophecies since they are infinite and everyday; right predictions are prized precisely because they are rare, unbelievable and marvelous”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.11)↳ journal/essays
on thought and existence philosophy
“A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicative ‘think’. ‘One’ thinks; but that this ‘one’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’, which is only a supposition and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on freedom philosophy
“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on order philosophy
“The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited↳ journal/brave-new-world-brave-new-world-revisited
on moralizers philosophy
“The wicked who are happy – a species about whom the moralists are silent”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on ethics philosophy
“Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on free will philosophy
“The doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty… Men were thought of as ‘free’ so that they could become guilty: consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness… Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on reason philosophy
“Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for children and childish minds”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on knowledge philosophy
“A bird’s given two wings, not four, because it can fly with two; so a man’s not given to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows”
— (the old man), Anton Chekhov, In the Ravine↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on knowledge philosophy
“There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on erudition philosophy
“Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who ran through the whole range of human knowledge only to find that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on erudition philosophy
“The truly wise are like ears of corn: they shoot up and up holding their heads proudly erect – so long as they are empty; but when, in their maturity, they are full of swelling grain, their foreheads droop and they show humility”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)↳ journal/essays
on honesty philosophy
“Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides”
— (Ivan Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on human caprice philosophy
“We modern men, are determined by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, and are seldom unequivocal”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on sadism philosophy
“To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals↳ journal/the-genealogy-of-morals
on strength philosophy
“Perhaps it is human nature to spare no torment when the victim accepts any suffering out of genuine humility, weakness or indifference. Don't we all like proving our strength at the expense of someone or something? The feeblest creature, the street urchin, rings all the doorbells when it is freezing outside, or scrambled to write his name on a monument as yet undefiled”
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on strength philosophy
“Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on unhappiness philosophy
“The happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him – illness, poverty, loss – and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life only stir him slightly, as wind stirs an aspen – and everything is fine”
— (Ivan Ivanovich), Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on unhappiness philosophy
“The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on fickleness philosophy
“What causes inconstancy is the realization that present pleasures are false, together with the failure to realize that absent pleasures are vain”
— Blaise Pascal, Penseés↳ journal/pensees
on suffering philosophy
“Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far – and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals↳ journal/the-genealogy-of-morals
on damnation philosophy
“Jesus had to invent hell to send thither those who would not love him”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on damnation philosophy
“Eternal punishment, because of a few years’ shortcomings here on earth, would be the reverse of Godlike. Satan himself would recoil from it”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography
on hope philosophy
“It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers↳ journal/why-zebras-dont-get-ulcers
on hope philosophy
“What we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on ideals philosophy
“I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. Then they lived impudently in brief pleasures and barely cast their goals beyond the day. The wings of their spirit broke, and now their spirit crawls about and soils what it gnaws. Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are voluptuaries. The hero is for them an offense and a fright”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on disillusionment philosophy
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on disillusionment philosophy
“[The green light] had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on disillusionment philosophy
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning --- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on disillusionment philosophy
“She thought back to summer evenings flooded with sunlight… How happy those days had been! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were none left now. She had spent them in all the different adventures of her soul, in all those successive stages she had gone through, in her virginity, her marriage, and her love – losing them continuously as her life went on, like a traveler who leaves some part of his wealth at every inn along the road”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary↳ journal/madame-bovary
on disillusionment philosophy
”If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms↳ journal/a-farewell-to-arms
on imagination philosophy
“I [the phantasm] exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means that I, too, exist in nature”
— (The Black Monk), Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on reason philosophy
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature↳ journal/a-treatise-of-human-nature
on reason philosophy
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do”
— Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography↳ journal/autobiography-franklin
on intelligence philosophy
"It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently"
— (Raskolnikov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on fortune philosophy
“It is madness to expect that Fortune will ever supply us with enough weapons to use against herself”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.14)↳ journal/essays
on age and religion philosophy
“We inevitably turn to God in old age, for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses”
— (Mustapha Mond), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World↳ journal/brave-new-world-brave-new-world-revisited
on history philosophy
“These boarders hinted at dramas past or present; not the dramas performed in the glare of the footlights against painted backcloths, but living, wordless dramas, icy dramas to stir and sear the heart, dramas without end”
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on history philosophy
“Fatalism in history is inevitable for the explanation of senseless phenomena. The more we try to explain sensibly these phenomena of history, the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace↳ journal/war-and-peace
on history philosophy
“Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace↳ journal/war-and-peace
on history philosophy
“In historical events the so-called great men are labels that give the event a name, which, just as with labels, has the least connection of all with the event itself”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace↳ journal/war-and-peace
on history philosophy
“The ‘great men’ as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed afterwards; in the world of historical values spurious coinage prevails”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil↳ journal/beyond-good-and-evil
on history philosophy
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on socialism philosophy
“All these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible misers, acquirers, property-lovers, so much so that the more socialist a man is, the further he goes, the more he loves property”
— (Stepan Verkhovensky), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons↳ journal/demons
on socialists philosophy
“One odd thing about [the ex-revolutionaries] though, was that when they abandoned communism, as some young Chinese middle school student leaders did, they often became extremely avaricious to make up for lost time. They seemed to feel that they had been robbed of the best years of their lives and had to make up for what they had missed. It was a preview of what I was to see later in China and Vietnam. When the revolution did not deliver utopia and the economy reverted to the free market, cadres, with the power to issue licenses or with access to goods and services at official prices, were the first to be corrupt and exploit the masses”
— Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story↳ journal/the-singapore-story
on resentment philosophy
“The two young people passed sovereign judgment on society the more readily because of the inferiority of their own status, for unappreciated men make up for their lowly position by the disdainful eye they cast upon the world”
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on suffering philosophy
“Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men, I think, must feel great sorrow in this world”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on psychology philosophy
“The [sick man] is delighted for a moment and then grows giddy, the water turns to gall, and he vomits and has colic, and is more exceedingly thirsty”
— Epictetus, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-fragments-manual
on psychology philosophy
“The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken”
— (Dick Diver), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night↳ journal/tender-is-the-night
on guilt philosophy
“Once I played a most shameless nasty trick on him, he never did anything to me; and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it”
— (Fyodor Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on shame philosophy
“It’s terribly difficult for an offended man when everyone suddenly starts looking like his benefactor”
— (Alyosha Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on shame philosophy
“There are people who feel deeply but are somehow beaten down. Their buffoonery is something like spiteful irony against those to whom they dare not speak the truth directly because of a long-standing, humiliating timidity before them”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on human nature philosophy
“Human nature is a mirror, sir, the cleanest mirror!”
— (Porfiry Petrovich), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on self-awareness philosophy
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
— Carl Jung
on fate philosophy
“That I am a doctor and you are a mental patient has no morality or logic in it – it’s a matter of pure chance”
— (Yefimych), Anton Chekhov, Ward No. 6↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on fate philosophy
“It had to be that the strong hinder the life of the weak, such was the law of nature, but this thought could be clearly and easily formulated only in a newspaper article or a textbook, while in the mishmash that is everyday life, in the tangle of all the trifles of which human relations are woven, it was not a law but a logical incongruity, when strong and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations, inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown, extraneous to life, alien to man”
— (Korolev), Anton Chekhov, A Medical Case↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on self-deception philosophy
“[The doctor] would like to hide out the stark reality: that he is alone, without gain, without a past, with an intelligence which is clouded, a body which is disintegrating. For this reason he has carefully built up, furnished, and padded his nightmare compensation: he says he is making progress”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on moral judgments philosophy
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita↳ journal/lolita
on conscience philosophy
”Conscience is the kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself”
— (Lousteau), Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions↳ journal/lost-illusions
on good and evil philosophy
“No one chooses a thing realizing that it is evil; but when it appears as good in contrast to a greater evil, he takes the bait and is caught”
— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings↳ journal/letters-principal-doctrines-and-vatican-sayings
on evil philosophy
“Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us – under the right or wrong circumstances. That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots”
— Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect↳ journal/the-lucifer-effect
on evil philosophy
“If the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness”
— (Ivan Karamazov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on evil philosophy
“People love crime, and love it always, not just at moments. It’s as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since. They all say, they hate what’s bad, but secretly they all love it”
— (Lise), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on avarice philosophy
“Gold became his passion, his ideal, fear, delight, purpose. The artist, like everyone else to whom this terrible gift is granted, began to be a bore, inaccessible to anything but gold, a needless miser, a purposeless hoarder, and was about to turn into one of those strange beings who are so numerous in our unfeeling world, at whom a man filled with life and heart looks with horror, who seem to him like moving stone coffins with dead men instead of hearts in them”
— Nikolai Gogol, The Portrait↳ journal/selected-short-stories
on capitalism philosophy
“The boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on capitalism philosophy
“Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labor-power. It’s just as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on capitalism philosophy
“Capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into the social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the laborer”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on market crisis philosophy
“Overproduction is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is, to exploit the maximum amount of labor with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on automation philosophy
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital↳ journal/capital-grundrisse-communist-manifesto
on nature philosophy
“Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a workman there”
— (Bazarof), Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons↳ journal/fathers-and-sons
on practicality philosophy
“Lack of originality has always been looked on since time immemorial as the outstanding quality and highest recommendation of a sensible, businesslike, and practical man”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot↳ journal/the-idiot
on simple labor philosophy
“The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding. He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”
— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
on utilitarianism philosophy
“Wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime?”
— (Raskolnikov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on crime philosophy
“The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly”
— (Vautrin), Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot↳ journal/pere-goriot
on crime philosophy
“I decidedly do not understand why hurling bombs at people according to all the rules of siege warfare is a more respectable form [of crime over petty murder]”
— (Raskolnikov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on crime and reason philosophy
“The criminal experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childlike thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on life’s meaning philosophy
“I saw the meaning of life was to make a living, its goal to become a councillor, that the rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars, that cordiality was to say ‘may it do you good’ after a meal, that piety was to go to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on life’s meaning philosophy
“Perhaps the whole goal mankind strives for on earth consists just in this ceaselessness of the process of achievement alone, that is to say, in life itself, and not essentially in the goal, which, of course, is bound to be nothing other than two times two is four – that is, a formula; and two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death”
— (Underground Man), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground↳ journal/notes-from-underground
on life’s meaning philosophy
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning↳ journal/mans-search-for-meaning
on life’s meaning philosophy
“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning↳ journal/mans-search-for-meaning
on frivolity philosophy
“To excite our souls we need no causes: they can be controlled and excited by some raving disembodied fancy based on nothing”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.4)↳ journal/essays
on existence philosophy
“The whole human enterprise seems indeed to consist in man’s proving to himself every moment that he is a man and not a sprig”
— (Underground Man), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground↳ journal/notes-from-underground
on existence philosophy
“I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason [for my crime]!”
— (Raskolnikov), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on existence philosophy
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on existence philosophy
“I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on existence philosophy
“Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on existence philosophy
”[A human] is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose… We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking… One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole - there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on death philosophy
“‘Death. Yes, death. And none of them knows, or wants to know, or feel pity. They’re playing. It makes no difference to them, but they’ll also die. Fools. For me sooner, for them later; but it will be the same for them. Yet they make merry. Brutes!’”
— (Ivan Ilyich), Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on death philosophy
“The lie [that he was merely ill and not dying], this lie, perpetrated upon him on the eve of his death, the lie that must needs reduce the dreadful, solemn act of his death to the level of all their visits, curtains, sturgeon dinners… was terribly tormenting for Ivan Ilyich”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on death philosophy
“The dreadful, terrible act of his dying, he saw, was reduced by all those around him to the level of an accidental unpleasantness, partly an indecency (something like dealing with a man who comes into a drawing room spreading a bad smell), and in the name of that very ‘decency’ he had served all his life; he saw that no one would feel sore for him, because no one even wanted to understand his situation”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on death philosophy
“Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich↳ journal/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich
on women philosophy
“The brilliant women’s ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood, so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on women philosophy
“Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on women philosophy
“It is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on women philosophy
“The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in most cases the worshiper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which the soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on chastity philosophy
“Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But men make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages in it consequences which are worse than their cause”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.5)↳ journal/essays
on sexuality philosophy
“It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on freedom philosophy
“There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting for him, either”
— (Grand Inquisitor), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on superficiality philosophy
“When one is confronted with a face sparkling with righteousness, after a moment this sparkle dies away, and only an ashy residue remains; this residue interested me”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on superficiality philosophy
“The shallowness of a water nixie’s soul may have a charm until she becomes didactic”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch↳ journal/middlemarch
on superficiality philosophy
“He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby↳ journal/the-great-gatsby
on conformity philosophy
“There is for man no preoccupation more constant or more nagging than, while in a condition of freedom, quickly to find someone to bow down before”
— (Grand Inquisitor), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on conformity philosophy
“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves as mirrors as they appear to their friends”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on conformity philosophy
“While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving↳ journal/the-art-of-loving
on social hypocrisy philosophy
“The patrons who pay for the production of these shows are held in esteem such as most parents would wish for their children. Yet the same parents willingly allow their children to be flogged if they are distracted by these displays from the studies which are supposed to fit them to grow rich and give the same sort of shows themselves”
— Saint Augustine, Confessions↳ journal/confessions
on genius philosophy
“How lucky Buddha and Mohammed and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration! If Mohammed had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, worked only two hours a day, and drunk milk, there would have been as little left after this remarkable man as after his dog”
— (Kovrin), Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on independence philosophy
“Everyone strives to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation”
— (Zosima’s visitor), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on illusion of progress philosophy
“We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display”
— (Zosima), Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov↳ journal/the-brothers-karamazov
on illusion of progress philosophy
“Among scientists, writers, and artists, work is at the boil, the comforts of life increase every day thanks to them, bodily needs multiply, and man still remains the most predatory and slovenly of animals, and the tendency in the majority of mankind is toward degeneration and the permanent loss of all vitality”
— (the artist), Anton Chekhov, The House with the Mezzanine↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on superficial friendship philosophy
“To see what friendship is, throw a piece of meat among [the dogs] and you will learn”
— Epictetus, Discourses↳ journal/discourses-fragments-manual
on theory against practice philosophy
“He suffered greatly from the thought that though he knew how to devise the theory, he was unable to step over [his moral bounds] without hesitation and therefore is not a man of genius”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment↳ journal/crime-and-punishment
on time philosophy
“The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. He touched one end, and the other moved”
— Anton Chekhov, The Student↳ journal/selected-short-stories-chekhov
on time philosophy
“I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea↳ journal/nausea
on philosophy philosophy
“What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: “Pressing Done Here”. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or↳ journal/either-or
on philosophy philosophy
“The thinkers discover that they have in fact only brought more trouble on their heads than they have gained in the way of happiness. On this account they come to envy, rather than to despise, the more common run of men”
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals↳ journal/groundwork-of-the-metaphysics-of-morals
on philosophy philosophy
“Philosophy asserts that gods enjoy health as it really is, though they can understand illness; Man, on the contrary, enjoys his goods only in fantasy, but knows ills as they really are”
— Plutarch, Against the Stoics
on philosophy philosophy
“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keep to accept in payment”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)↳ journal/essays
on philosophy philosophy
“I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher Thales with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, made him trip over, to warn him that it was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet. It was good advice she gave him, to study himself rather than the sky… No philosopher understands his neighbor’s actions nor even his own; he does not even know what either of them is in himself, beast or Man”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)↳ journal/essays
on sophistry philosophy
“There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all doing him honor. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the Lendit fair”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)↳ journal/essays
on rhetoric philosophy
”I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms↳ journal/a-farewell-to-arms
on perspectives philosophy
“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals↳ journal/the-genealogy-of-morals
on ideology philosophy
“Heavy ideology is one of the most extreme distorters of human cognition”
— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack↳ journal/poor-charlies-almanack
on technology philosophy
“There is not always a positive advance. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
on technology and religion philosophy
“Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day forfeit their ability even to understand the questions being asked”
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
on technology and medicine philosophy
“Every advance in medicine will tend to be offset by a corresponding advance in the survival rate of individuals cursed by some genetic insufficiency”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited↳ journal/brave-new-world-brave-new-world-revisited
on technology and medicine philosophy
“There is almost always a long tail of possibility [for terminal illness], however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multi trillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win”
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End↳ journal/being-mortal
on old age philosophy
“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete”
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End↳ journal/being-mortal
on religion philosophy
“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra↳ journal/thus-spoke-zarathustra
on religion philosophy
“‘Sins’ are indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins, he needs ‘the commission of sins’… Supreme law: ‘God forgives him who repents’ - in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on religion philosophy
“Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God - it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! - Moral; science is the forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ↳ journal/twilight-of-the-idols-the-anti-christ
on religion philosophy
“The gods are just. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men”
— (Mustapha Mond), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World↳ journal/brave-new-world-brave-new-world-revisited
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