~Solar Plexus~

philosophybits:

“Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy

philosophybits:

“All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one’s condition, and is thus suffering as long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is only the beginning of a new striving. We see striving everywhere inhibited in many ways, struggling everywhere; and thus always suffering; there is no final goal of striving, and therefore no bounds or end to suffering.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

philosophybits:

“It is true: we love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

philosophybits:

“People wrest only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”

— Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama

philosophybits:

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

— Epictetus, Discourses

philosophybits:

“It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in million years nothing we do now will matter.”

— Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions

philosophybits:

“There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.”

— Charles Sanders Peirce, “On Phenomenology”, The Essential Peirce, vol 2

philosophybits:

“All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

rabid-glow:

“I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often those patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”

—  Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland