Philosophy From The Source

[philosophyfromthesource]

Judgements, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms- in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

[kir-ko]

The best way to torture your enemies is to always be in a good mood

Diogenes the cynic (412-323BC)

[philosophyfromthesource]

"I know now that even bodies are not received by the senses or the faculty of imagining, but are perceived only by the mind, and that they are not perceived by being touched or seen but only by being understood, and therefore I know clearly that there is nothing that can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind."

René Decartes- Meditations

[philosophyfromthesource]

"Everything that I have accepted as being most true up to now I acquired from the senses or through the senses. However, I have occasionally found that they deceive me, and it is prudent never to trust those who have deceived us, even if only once.

Renè Decartes- Meditations

[philosophyfromthesource]

"It is easy to praise providence for everything that happens in the world provided you have both the ability to see individual events in the context of the whole and a sense of gratitude. Without these, either you will not see the usefulness of what happens or, even supposing that you do see it, you will not be grateful for it."

Epictetus- Discourses

[philosophyfromthesource]

I am not unselfish so long as the end remains my own, and I, instead of giving myself up to the blind means of its fulfillment, leave it always an open question. My zeal need not on that account to be slacker than the most fanatical, but at the same time I remain toward it frostily cold, unbelieving, and it's most irreconcilable enemy; I remain its judge, because I am its owner.

Max Stirner, Ego and His Own

[philosophyfromthesource]

There are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death

Emil Cioran, On The Heights Of Deapair

[philosophyfromthesource]

Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus

[philosophyfromthesource]

...but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his "true and highest" interest. You carry your knightly service for this beauty so far that your firm her to be the only beauty of the world. You live not to yourself, but to your spirit and to what is the spirit's that is, ideas.

Max Stirner, The Ego And His Own

[philosophyfromthesource]

Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen, do with it as much as can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer thrust and it's stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it can delude nothing but our sense; you cannot lead astray the spirit and spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got back of things, the spirit has also got above them, and become free from their bonds, emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom".

Max Stirner, The Ego And His Own

[philosophyfromthesource]

Whence living among men without sharing their interests, I could not manage to believe in the commitments I made. I was courteous and indolent enough to live up to what was expected of me in my profession, my family, or my civic life, but each time with a sort of indifference that spoiled everything. I lived my whole life under a double code, and my most serious acts were often the ones in which I was the least involved.

Albert Camus, The Fall

[philosophyfromthesource]

As the ancients worked toward the conquest of the world and strove to release man from the heavy trammels of connection with other things, at last they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to everything private. Of course community, family, and so forth, as natural relations are burdensome hindrances which diminish my spiritual freedom

Max Stirner, The Ego And His Own

[philosophyfromthesource]

Man, Sartre tells us, is "a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being." That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it... It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity 

[philosophyfromthesource]

For, as we have said, he who does not lay his foundation’s beforehand May by great abilities do so afterwards, although with great trouble to the architect and danger to the building.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

[philosophyfromthesource]

The comfortable settled man says to himself; "How could one live without being sure of the morrow; how could one sleep without roof over ones head?" But misfortune turns him out of house and home. He must perforce sleep under a hedge. He cannot rest, he is full of terrors. There may be wild beast, fellow-tramps. But in the long run he gets use to it. He will trust himself to chance, live like a tramp, and sleep his sleep in a ditch

Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

[philosophyfromthesource]

But in republics there is greater life, greater hatred, and more desire for vengeance; they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their ancient liberty...

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

[philosophyfromthesource]

For fortune can afflict us with disease, take away our money, calumniate us to people or the tyrant, but it cannot make a good and brave and high-souled man bad and cowardly and ignoble and malicious, nor deprive him of the disposition which, as long as he keeps it, is of more value to him in the conduct of his life than is a pilot to a ship at sea.

Plutarch- Peace of Mind