Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 15

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Q1688

DriveArt

Michelangelo was carving marble into his last week, and left behind a sketch inscribed 'ancora imparo' — I am still learning. He had by then been the most celebrated artist in Europe for over fifty years.

He worked on the Rondanini Pietà within days of his death at eighty-eight, reworking the same block so drastically that a previous version's arm still hangs from it. The phrase 'ancora imparo' is traditionally attributed to him rather than firmly documented, so treat the inscription as likely-but-not-certain — the working, however, is not in doubt. He was also chief architect of St Peter's in his eighties, and refused payment for it, saying he did the work for the love of God.

Art historyRead card

Q1693

StillnessLanguage

Gezellig describes a room, an evening or a group of people that feels easy and warm — not the furniture, and not the event, but the atmosphere between people when nobody is trying. The Dutch treat it as untranslatable.

It attaches to almost anything: a café can be gezellig, so can a conversation, a chair, or a Tuesday. What it always means is a shared, unforced comfort — which is why an expensive restaurant can fail to be gezellig and a cramped kitchen can manage it easily. It is close to Danish hygge but more social; hygge can be solitary, gezellig usually needs at least one other person. Dutch speakers reach for it constantly, and reliably say it is the first thing they miss in English.

DutchRead card

Q1696

StillnessLanguage

Yūgen points at a depth you feel without being shown — wind moving through a forest you cannot see into, a voice trailing off, the sense that something vast lies just past what is in front of you.

The term came from Chinese philosophical writing and was taken up in medieval Japanese poetry and noh theatre, where it became a central goal: to suggest rather than state. The playwright Zeami described it partly through images — a swan holding a flower in its bill, geese seen through distant clouds. The principle behind it is restraint. What is fully shown is finished; what is half-hidden keeps working on you afterwards. It is a useful idea well outside art, and it explains why the best endings are rarely the ones that explain everything.

Japanese aestheticsRead card

Q1698

DriveMind

Researchers read nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from people at work and found the single strongest driver of a good day was not praise or reward. It was making progress on something that mattered, however small.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer collected daily accounts from over two hundred people across seven companies. On days people recorded a step forward, their mood, motivation and perception of their work all rose; on days they recorded a setback, all three fell, and setbacks hit harder than equivalent progress lifted. Crucially the steps did not have to be big. The practical consequence is unglamorous: protect a little forward motion every day, and make it visible to yourself, because the feeling of progress is doing more work than any reward.

Harvard Business SchoolRead card

Q1701

StillnessMind

Under stress, switching from 'why am I panicking' to 'why are you panicking' — using your own name — measurably reduces distress. The small grammatical distance seems to be doing the work.

Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who addressed themselves in the second or third person before a stressful task — public speaking, in several studies — performed better, ruminated less afterwards and showed calmer physiological responses than those using 'I'. The effect appears to come from stepping into an observer's position, which is the same move that makes it easier to advise a friend than yourself. It costs nothing and takes a sentence, which is unusual for a psychological finding.

Psychology researchRead card

Q1704

StillnessMind

Savouring is the deliberate act of noticing something good while it is happening, or replaying it afterwards. It sounds trivial. In studies it is one of the more reliable ways to raise day-to-day wellbeing.

Fred Bryant's research distinguishes it from simple pleasure: savouring is attention paid on purpose — pausing on a first mouthful, telling someone about a good hour, letting a piece of music finish without reaching for the phone. Because much of what makes a day good passes unregistered, the gain comes from noticing rather than from adding anything. Studies find the effect stronger for small, frequent things than for large rare ones, which is convenient, since ordinary days are mostly made of small things.

Positive psychologyRead card

Q1715

StillnessLanguage

Toki Pona is a complete constructed language with about 120 to 140 core words. Its limit is the point: it makes speakers choose the simplest useful shape of a thought.

Toki Pona is often described as minimalist, but the better word is deliberate. Instead of adding a separate word for every shade of meaning, it asks the speaker to build from a small set of roots. Friend becomes good person. Tool becomes a useful thing. The exercise is not only linguistic; it is mental tidying. You find out which parts of a thought are load-bearing and which are decoration.

Toki PonaRead card

Q1733

DriveProverbs

Drop by drop, a lake is formed.

The proverb is usually used for saving money, but its reach is wider. A page a day, a kind word repeated, a language practised badly but faithfully, a repair made before collapse — small acts become geography when they keep arriving. The lake is not a miracle. It is accumulation made visible.

Turkish proverbRead card

Q1734

StillnessProverbs

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata — what is the most important thing in the world? It is people.

The line is often quoted in Aotearoa New Zealand because it refuses to let value become abstract. Not wealth, not status, not the plan: people. In Māori contexts it belongs to a wider ethic of relationship, care and responsibility. It is simple enough to sound obvious, which is why it bears repeating. Most failures of judgement begin by forgetting it.

Māori whakataukīRead card

Q1735

WonderProverbs

Knowledge is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.

The baobab is the right image because it defeats the arms. You can stand before it, learn from it, take shade from it, but you cannot wrap yourself around the whole. Knowledge is like that: too wide for one mind, healthiest when approached with others. The proverb is an argument against intellectual loneliness. Understanding grows better in company.

Akan proverbRead card

Q1977

WonderScience

Noether's theorem connects each differentiable continuous symmetry of a system's action with a conserved quantity, linking time translation to energy and spatial translation to momentum.

If an experiment's laws do not change when it is performed tomorrow rather than today, energy is conserved; if they do not care where it happens, momentum is conserved. Emmy Noether proved the general bridge between such continuous symmetries and conserved quantities in 1918. A theorem born in abstract mathematics became part of the grammar of modern physics.

Emmy NoetherRead card

Q2039

StillnessLanguage

Japanese tea culture keeps a four-character phrase, 'ichi-go ichi-e' — one lifetime, one meeting. However often the same guests gather in the same room, this exact hour will never assemble itself again, and should be honoured accordingly.

The sentiment goes back to the great tea master Sen no Rikyū's circle — a disciple recorded in 1588 that every gathering should be treated as one that can occur only once in a lifetime. The exact phrase was set down in 1858 by the statesman and tea devotee Ii Naosuke. It is not a call to melancholy but to attention: pour the tea as if this is the only time, because it is.

Ichi-go ichi-eRead card

Q2065

WonderTechnology

Deep in a west Texas mountain, engineers are installing a clock designed to keep time for ten thousand years — powered partly by daily temperature swings, ticking through centuries whether or not anyone visits.

Designer Danny Hillis proposed it in the 1990s as a provocation: civilisation, he argued, had lost the habit of thinking past the next quarter. A first prototype has ticked since New Year's Eve 1999 and lives in London's Science Museum; the full-scale version, funded by Jeff Bezos inside a 150-metre shaft, has no announced opening date. The clock is engineered so its bells ring a new sequence each day it chimes — never repeating across ten thousand years.

Clock of the Long NowRead card

Q2066

WonderHistory

At Ise in Japan, the grand shrine's main sanctuaries are dismantled and rebuilt on an adjacent plot every twenty years, a cycle running — with some historical interruptions — since the year 690. The next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The point is not the buildings but the knowledge: each generation of shrine carpenters raises the sanctuaries once as apprentices and once as masters, so thousand-year-old joinery lives in working hands rather than in archives. Western conservation asks how to stop time; Ise answers by letting the wood go and keeping the skill. The shrine is always new and always ancient — a building maintained the way a song is, by being performed again.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card

Q2067

WonderHistory

The story goes that when New College, Oxford, needed new oak beams for its medieval hall, it found oaks planted centuries earlier for exactly that purpose. The archives tell it differently — and the truth is quietly better.

The hall roof really was rebuilt in oak in 1865, and the college really did own oak woods acquired in the 1400s. But no record supports the beloved details — the purpose-planted grove, the forester's 'we wondered when you'd ask'. What the archives show instead is ordinary, patient woodland management sustained over five centuries, which meant great timber existed whenever it was needed. The legend praises a plan; the reality praises a habit. Habits, it turns out, are the stronger foresight.

New College oaksRead card

Q2076

DriveLiterature

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.

Le Guin was 85, collecting a medal for a lifetime of American letters, and she spent her few minutes at the microphone attacking the industry that was honouring her. Publishers, she said, were selling books as commodities and writers were letting them. Then came this line, and the argument underneath it: every arrangement that feels permanent was once defended as the natural order, and every one of them was made by people who could be argued with.

Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards speech (2014)Read card

Q2080

StillnessLiterature

Seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

These are the last lines of a book in which Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to an ageing Kublai Khan. The hell they are discussing is not somewhere else and not later — it is the one we make by living together, Polo says, and there are only two ways out. The first is to stop noticing it. The second is this one, which asks for constant attention and gives no comfort in return.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)Read card

Q2086

StillnessLiterature

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'

Szymborska's Nobel lecture is largely a defence of not knowing. Inspiration, she said, is not reserved for poets: it visits doctors, teachers and gardeners, anyone who keeps finding new questions in work they have done a thousand times. Against them she set the people who are certain — tyrants, fanatics, demagogues — for whom knowledge arrives once, complete, and never has to be revisited. She had lived in Poland under both.

Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Lecture (1996)Read card

Q2092

StillnessLiterature

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Pessoa worked as a commercial translator in Lisbon and wrote under more than seventy invented names, each with a biography and a style of its own. This book belongs to Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who never leaves the city. Pessoa left it as thousands of loose, undated sheets in a wooden trunk. It was first assembled and published in 1982, forty-seven years after his death, and no two editions agree on the order.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietRead card

Q2093

StillnessPhilosophy

All of humanity's misfortune comes from one thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.

The version everybody shares — 'the inability to sit quietly in a room alone' — adds a word Pascal never used. His French says only 'in a room'; the loneliness is our contribution. He was writing about what he called divertissement: hunting, gambling, war, court intrigue, anything that keeps a person too busy to notice their own condition. Pascal invented a calculating machine at nineteen and a public bus service at thirty-nine, so he knew the pull he was describing.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)Read card

Q2094

StillnessPhilosophy

To study the Buddha way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself.

Dōgen sailed to China as a young monk with one question he could not get answered at home: if we are already enlightened, why practise at all? He came back with an answer that refuses the split — practice is not the road to the state, it is the state. 'Forgetting the self' is not erasure. It is what happens when you stop measuring every experience against yourself, which is only possible after you have looked at yourself very carefully.

Dōgen, 'Genjōkōan', Shōbōgenzō (1233)Read card

Q2095

StillnessPhilosophy

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!

Kenkō was a court official who became a Buddhist monk and spent his later years writing short, unconnected pieces on whatever crossed his mind — manners, moonlight, the correct way to be old. Adashino was a burial ground outside Kyoto, so notorious for the brief lives it held that its dew became shorthand for transience. His argument is not resignation. It is that the value of anything is inseparable from the fact that it ends.

Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness (c. 1330)Read card

Q2096

StillnessPhilosophy

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Murdoch wrote philosophy and twenty-six novels, and thought the two jobs were closer than her colleagues allowed. The sentence continues: love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. Her claim is that we default to a soft version of the world in which other people are supporting characters, and that noticing they are not — properly, repeatedly noticing — is both what good art trains and what goodness consists of.

Iris Murdoch, 'The Sublime and the Good' (1959)Read card

Q2097

DriveHealth

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Lorde wrote this in the journals she kept while living with liver cancer, having already survived breast cancer six years earlier. She was refusing a second round of surgery and deciding how to spend the time she had. The line has since been printed on bath products and wellness calendars, which reverses it: she was not recommending a treat. She was arguing that a body the world would rather lose has a political reason to stay alive.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)Read card