Blog

Tag: philosophy

  • August 30th, 2014 1:56am

    There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

    — Helen Keller – reflecting on the coincidence that one of her Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich.

  • January 31st, 2013 11:48pm

    Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on.

    — Philip K. Dick – A Scanner Darkly (via bieberssi)

  • January 31st, 2013 11:36pm

    There was an episode, one of my favorite moments in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, ‘Somewhere out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.’ Of course your heart sinks and you think it’s going to be ‘I love you’ or whatever. He says, ‘Please help me.’ What a philosophically fantastic idea – that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing.

    — Hugh Laurie  (via uoa)

  • December 13th, 2012 6:17pm

    ‘No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,’ Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.

    —

    Charles Simic, “Winter’s Philosophers”, on NYRBlog

    Only a writer with the uncommon grace of Simic could have written something so slamdunkingly resonant regarding the onset of these now unavoidable winter afternoons and manage to namecheck effortlessly not just Voltaire and Dickinson, as in this passage, but earlier also Dovlatov, Cioran, Plato, Socrates, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Wittgenstein, Boethius, everyone, no one, all of us.

    (via classicpenguin)

  • December 6th, 2012 9:55pm

    I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and on many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little but if I can’t figure it out then I go onto something else but I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it is as far as I can tell, possibly. But it doesn’t frighten me.

    —

    – Richard Feynman.

    I love this man. One of the most brilliant men of our time since Einstein, Feynman saw through the educational system, explored the world in a more rational, skeptical way by interacting with the natural world & testing his knowledge & skepticism through experiment.

    Once he realized the cause & effect of his contributions to science, more specifically – to the disastrous aftermath of the atomic bomb – he completely swore off the military industry in despise of their actual motives.

    His life was well lived as a successful scientist, educator, husband, father, friend. He is succeeded only by those whom he’s inspired & educated through the benchmarks & platforms he established in physics (& science in general) for future generations of all fields.

    (via sagansense)

  • November 20th, 2012 7:24pm

    I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed. The problems we face today, violent conflicts, destruction of nature, poverty, hunger, and so on, are human-created problems which can be resolved through human effort, understanding and the development of a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to cultivate a universal responsibility for one another and the planet we share. Although I have found my own Buddhist religion helpful in generating love and compassion, even for those we consider our enemies, I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.

    — His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, in his speech of acceptance to the Peace Nobel Prize in 1989.