Quotes About Philosophy

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. –Carl Jung

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. —Socrates

The arrow shot by the archer may or may not kill a single person. But stratagems devised by a wise man can kill even babes in the womb. KAUTILYA, INDIAN PHILOSOPHER, THIRD CENTURY B.C.

Los chinos tienen un proverbio: "Cuando el Yang está en su fase ascendente, el Yin nace", lo que traducido a nuestro lenguaje quiere decir que cuando un hombre ha dedicado lo mejor de su vida a los asuntos ordinarios de la sobrevivencia, el Yin o lado emocional de su naturaleza sale a la superficie y reclama sus derechos. Cuando ocurre este periodo, todo lo que antes parecía importante pierde su significación.

But it would be wise to practice instead the opposite, what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Mitfreude—"joying with." As he wrote, "The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals.

Character is destiny. —Heraclitus

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity . . . but to love it. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

In the end, think of this philosophy in the following terms: Since the beginning of human consciousness, our awareness of death has terrified us. This terror has shaped our beliefs, our religions, our institutions, and so much of our behavior in ways we cannot see or understand. We humans have become the slaves to our fears and our evasions.

Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. . . . It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. . . . He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.

In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them.

Los hombres son más prestos a devolver un agravio que un favor, porque la gratitud es una carga y la venganza un placer. TÁCITO, ca. 55-120 d.C.

Si tropiezas con un rasgo especial de maldad o estupidez, […] no permitas que te enfade o te perturbe; velo como una adición a tu conocimiento, un dato nuevo a tomar en cuenta en el estudio del carácter de la humanidad. Tu actitud será la del mineralogista que tropieza con un muy peculiar espécimen de un mineral. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure. —Tacitus

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer devised a quick way to test for envy. Tell suspected enviers some good news about yourself—a promotion, a new and exciting love interest, a book contract. You will notice a very quick expression of disappointment

the wise man never assumes anything, never regrets anything, is never wrong, never changes his mind.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: 'What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.

He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think—a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy

si alguien me preguntara: «Tiro, ¿por qué te saltas un período tan largo de la vida de Cicerón?», me vería obligado a contestarle: «Amigo mío, porque esos fueron años de felicidad, y hay pocos asuntos cuya lectura resulte más aburrida que la felicidad»

Atticus's rule was that while he would never lend a book, any of his friends were free whenever they liked to come up and read or even make their own copies. And it was here, beneath a head of Aristotle, that we found Atticus reclining that afternoon, dressed in the loose white tunic of a Greek, and reading, if I remember rightly, a volume of Kyriai doxai, the principal doctrines of Epicurus. He came straight to the point. "I was at dinner last

shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle's Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.

El arte de la vida consiste en saber enfrentarnos a los problemas a medida que surgen en lugar de amargarnos la existencia preocupándonos antes de que aparezcan.

But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect