Works of [literary] genius have this intrinsic quality, that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life’s inevitable unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness… they are always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm.
Month: August 2018
Quote: Seneca on the Happy Life
What is a happy life? It is peacefulness and lasting tranquillity, the sources of which are a great spirit and a steady determination to hold fast to good decisions. How does one arrive at these things?
Quote: Chinese Philosophy on Ritual
Only through training do we become able to respond well . . . At the beginning [of our lives] one responds through emotions; at the end, one responds through propriety [learned through ritual]. —Anonymous (Fourth Century BCE) Nature that Emerges from the Decree
Quote: Rilke the Dragons in our Lives
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Quote: Pierre Hadot on Self Knowledge
To know oneself means, among other things, to know oneself qua non-sage: that is, not as a sophos, but as a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.
Whoever then has knowledge of good things, would know how to love them…
Whoever then has knowledge of good things, would know how to love them; but how could one who cannot distinguish good things from evil and things indifferent from both have power to love? —Epictetus Discourses, II.22
Quote: Pierre Hadot on Philosophy as an Attempt to Transform Mankind
Contemporary historians of philosophy ... in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity.
To Tell the Truth: ‘Truth Hath a Scratched Face’
Sanctimonious people everywhere denounce damn lies and the lying liars who tell them. Speaking the truth, they imply, would cure our political and personal ills. Its absence is the cause of our woes. But is telling the truth really good for you?
Feral Philosophy 