Philosophy Quotes

Be an artist in everything you do.

~ Debasish Mridha

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

~ Mark Rothko

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

~ Nick Land

What I mean when I talk about sovereignty is that we have a different way of being. Those of us who are organising around the idea of sovereignty are not asking for inclusion within the capitalist system. We're not asking for the so-called benefits of a capitalist system, which is always based on exclusions because it is based on privatising what was once communal and shared. We're saying no to being incorporated. We're saying yes to a completely different way of being, to a society based on commonality and plurality, not the fundamentalism of markets, religion, and the gender binary. We're not pushing to get in. Why should we want to enmesh ourselves in an economy and a political system that is driving the planet and our species toward destruction?

~ Sendolo Diamina

The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. *Vast*, beyond the powers of individual or collective cognition; *invisible*, in its fundamental forms; *overwhelming*, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck *with* a spectator, but a shipwreck *of* the spectator.

~ Alberto Toscano

The United States has never done away with slavery; we just stopped calling it such. These days, we call it free-market capitalism.

~ Michelle Templet

Topica from Afar discusses many topics and ideas. It brings the far ranging to the here and now and it is meant to enlighten and teach those whose minds are open to endless possibilities.Being written as you read.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

No construction of thought represents a label, barrier, or a full stop. Each sentence, paragraph, and page represents an exploratory probe into the unknown; each statement is an act of experimentation, investigation, creation, and growth.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A philosophy must be livable, it can't just be ideas.

~ Marty Rubin

[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They’re one way when they’re by themselves, and another when they’re surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves and grow more appealing, and funnier. You wouldn’t want all of intellectual life to be that social--we couldn’t make progress that way. But there’s a special atmosphere that develops whenever truly different ideas congregate, and, on the whole, it’s too rare.

~ Joshua Rothman

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

~ H.l. Mencken

Ideas are universal, the names and titles we give them are not.

~ Paul Pavlo Shiller

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?

~ Aldous Huxley

With astonishing wonder, I have seen the magic of life, the power of thoughts, and the beauty of imagination.

~ Debasish Mridha

If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong t

~ Albert Camus

What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.

~ Derek Parfit

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important

~ Iris Murdoch

Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.

~ Aristotle

Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.

~ Aristotle

The ordinary man so very rarely questions the principles in which he has been brought up, that he is usually willing, whenever he has a feeling that he ought to do 'x', to say on this ground that he ought to do 'x'.

~ R.m. Hare

...our ultimate moral principles can become so completely accepted by us, that we treat them, not as universal imperatives but as matters of fact; they have the same obstinate indubitability.

~ R.m. Hare

If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.

~ G.e. Moore

Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition

~ Baruch Spinoza

…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.

~ Baruch Spinoza

...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.

~ Peter Singer

Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics.

~ Neel Burton

… what I’m saying is that if we and all the other species on earth are the only life forms in the universe and if there are no gods and let’s face it apart from a few tired scrolls written 300 years after the death of Jesus and his disciples there is no actual proof of a God or gods then we, the humans, who are meant to be at the height of the evolutionary tree, are in fact at the bottom because no other species on this planet is enslaved to the economy. Every other species is born free and lives free. We humans are born into economic slavery and life crippling debt.

~ Arun D. Ellis

In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.

~ Leon R. Kass

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

~ Aristotle

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

~ Aristotle

Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?

~ Carl Sagan

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.

~ Baruch Spinoza

It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out.

~ John Stuart Mill

It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

~ Jacob Needleman

If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.

~ Plato

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life, I should not be honest otherwise.

~ George Santayana