Philosophy Bits

“One must not prostrate oneself before the minor impossibilities, otherwise the major impossibilities would never come into view.” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice‎

“Every artist who is open and attentive will necessarily become more aware with experience. And this means their work will continuously improve. What it is created today will not be the best by tomorrow's standard.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/artist...

“The oppressed has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves.” — Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”

“The highest good of those who follow virtue is common to all, and therefore all can equally rejoice therein.” — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“I've become too combative, too resistant, too fortified in myself. I'm fighting my way through life instead of flowing with it. All of this is unsustainable, and I need to bring an end to this tension before it brings an end to me.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/lost-i...

“Is logic the foundation of mathematics? In my view mathematical logic is simply part of mathematics. Russell’s calculus is not fundamental; it is just another calculus. There is nothing wrong with a science before the foundations are laid.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures: 1932-1935

“Silence is the safest policy for someone who does not trust himself.” — François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

“Today all art is marginal; and a far more appropriate model for any art work is that which takes place in the margin of another margin. (1/2)

“If theory were to wait for experience it would never come about.” — Novalis, Logological Fragments I

“Remember to pay attention to your attention. Recognize the connection between your suffering and your attachments, and how the former arises when your attention is controlled by the latter.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/rememberin...

“My spirit is too weak — mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” — John Keats, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

“The richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself; and ... the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself, for the greatness is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and every human being can be this if he so wills it.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

“He slips silently from the text into his imagination. The activity of reading becomes secondary to the world of the book that lives in his head, and this means his body becomes irrelevant.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/imagin...

“No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.” — Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

“Time moves so quickly for us simply because we are enormously distracted. We have endless responsibilities and obligations to fulfill, and our preoccupation with these things causes time to fly.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/slowin...

“Do what nature demands. Get a move on — if you have it in you — and don’t worry whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (9.29)

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.” — Berthold Auerbach, On the Heights

“Receptivity begins with the self’s effacement. This we fear in ourselves because we link passivity to non-existence and fear in others, perceiving a danger to ourselves in receptivity’s acquisitive capaciousness. (1/2)

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“See the needs that your attention is drawn to when it is open and free. Feel the joy that arises when one of your needs is met and notice the difference between this feeling and the relief that follows from satisfying an attachment.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/rememb...

“Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets them stiffen into convictions. — He, however, whose spirit is free and restlessly alive can prevent this stiffening through continual change.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait.” — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I reached out for something to attach myself to — and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself.” — Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“Life with others has its tempests, its storms of will, when it is wise to retire to a safe harbor and let the waves subside.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“When someone utters the word “iron” or “silver,” don’t we all think of the same thing? … But what happens when we say “just” or “good”? Doesn’t each one of us go in a different direction? Don’t we differ with one another and even with ourselves?” — Plato, Phaedrus

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The society of positivity, from which negativity has disappeared, is a society of bare life, which is exclusively dominated by the concern “to make sure of survival” in the face of discontinuity. (1/2)

“Kafka, though an avid reader of Kierkegaard, is connected with existentialist philosophy only to the extent that one speaks of down-and-outs as ‘annihilated existences’.” — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

“Were we to encounter such a being, we would not recognize it. It would seem to us far less than it actually is. We might appreciate it in a limited way, but we could not fully understand it.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/the-pe...

“I’m a chatterbox, a harmless, annoying chatterbox, like we all are. But what is to be done if the direct and only task of every intelligent man is to chatter, that is, an intentional pouring from the empty to the emptier.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.” — Michel de Montaigne, Essais

“The true God mimics the universe, the very region he has invaded: he takes on the likeness of sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters — he presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer noticed. (1/2)

“In science there are many matters about which people are agreed; in philosophy there are none.” — Bertrand Russell, Logical Atomism

“I must choose, and I must choose an option that enables action. For compassion is never merely theoretical — it is always substantive action to meet needs. I cannot allow myself to be distracted by impractical solutions.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/practi...

“The suffering itself is not so bad; it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.” — Allen Ginsberg, “Kerouac’s Ethic”

“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“We tend to become stuck with a very narrow way of seeing the world, a way that follows directly from the attachments we have formed. We build our identities around this narrow view, which keeps us trapped in an endless battle with suffering.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/who-we-are...

“Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” — Seneca, On Providence