Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Keep reading below, or choose a related topic to explore something different.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

StillnessLiterature

If the universe is a riddle, you are not here only to suffer over the answer. You are also here to sing.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its closing word points to the best-known quatrain in Edward FitzGerald's English version: a book of verses under a bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and the beloved “Beside me singing in the Wilderness”. The first edition of 1859 hardly sold, and the publisher later boasted of letting copies go for a penny. By the 1890s more than two million had been sold.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

StillnessLiterature

We are travellers between silence and silence. The miracle is not that life ends, but that it was given at all.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its picture of life as a short journey between two unknowns is close to a quatrain in Edward FitzGerald's English version: we come into the universe not knowing why or whence, “like Water willy-nilly flowing”, and leave it “as Wind along the Waste”. How much of this is Khayyam's own is uncertain. FitzGerald admitted that his translation was “very un-literal” and that many quatrains were “mashed together”.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote these notes to himself in Greek, some in army camps on the Danube frontier; the title Meditations came later. The card follows Gregory Hays's 2002 translation. George Long's 1862 version keeps closer to the Greek: live the rest of your life “according to nature”, which for the Stoics meant living by reason and virtue. The exercise is a memento mori, Latin for “remember that you will die”: count your life as over, and what is left becomes a gift.

Marcus AureliusRead card

StillnessLiterature

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

Raskolnikov says this in Part Three of Crime and Punishment (1866). A poor former law student in St Petersburg, he has murdered an old pawnbroker and is now visiting Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate, who has read his article claiming that “extraordinary” people may overstep the moral law for a great idea. When his friend Razumikhin asks whether such men should not at least suffer for the blood they shed, Raskolnikov replies that a man with a conscience will suffer, then adds this line “dreamily”.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

DrivePhilosophy

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

The thought belongs to Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794), a French writer famed for his wit in pre-revolutionary Paris. He wrote: “La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri”, the most wasted of all days is the one on which we have not laughed. He welcomed the Revolution, but his sharp tongue made enemies, and he died in 1794, during the Terror. The saying was published the following year. The Chaplin credit is recent: a character in the 1992 film Shining Through gives it to him.

After Nicolas Chamfort (1795); credited to Chaplin from 1992Read card

DrivePhilosophy

You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down.

The line comes from “Swing Little Girl”, a song Chaplin wrote for the 1969 re-release of The Circus, his 1928 silent comedy in which the Tramp becomes the unwitting star of a travelling circus. A hired singer recorded it first, without success, so the arranger Eric James suggested recording Chaplin too, just for his family. That version, sung by Chaplin at 79, is the one in the film. It plays over the opening credits as Merna Kennedy swings on a trapeze.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

This is aphorism 153 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886). It belongs to Part Four, a set of short sayings modelled on French writers such as La Rochefoucauld. In German: “Was aus Liebe gethan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse.” The first English translator, Helen Zimmern, knew Nietzsche personally. Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that good and evil are not fixed opposites. The aphorism does not say that love excuses everything, only that an act of love does not come from weighing rules, so moral bookkeeping cannot fully judge it.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.

This line is usually credited to Human, All Too Human (1878), the first book of short, pointed reflections, or aphorisms, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but it appears neither there nor in his other published works. The book does hold two close ideas. Aphorism 378 says the best friend will probably get the best wife, since a good marriage rests on a talent for friendship. Aphorism 406 advises anyone about to marry to ask whether they will still enjoy talking with this person in old age.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

Friedrich Nietzsche, later a leading German philosopher, was the son of a Lutheran pastor. In 1864 he began studying theology at the University of Bonn, but after one semester he gave it up, to his mother's anger, and lost his Christian faith. On 11 June 1865, aged twenty, he explained the change to his devout sister Elisabeth; the words on the card follow his line “Here the ways of men part”. That autumn he moved to Leipzig to study classical philology, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

All this struggle just for life to end on a random day.

No author is known for this line; it circulates online as a modern thought. The sting is in the word “random”: a life's effort is long, while its end keeps no appointment. Ancient philosophers argued that facing this plainly is useful rather than gloomy. In On the Shortness of Life, written around AD 49, the Roman philosopher Seneca says life is not short; we waste much of it, and used well it is long enough. The Latin reminder memento mori, “remember that you will die”, belongs to the same tradition.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes.

The line opens “I Burn For You”, a poem posted under the name Kamryn Tanner on Poetry.com, a site where anyone can publish verse; on social media it also travels under other, unreliable names. The poem speaks from inside a painful relationship, where the one who is hurt is also blamed. Psychologists call this victim blaming. In the 1960s the American psychologist Melvin Lerner linked it to the just-world belief: wanting the world to be fair, people often decide that those who suffer must have deserved it.

Kamryn TannerRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

This line is shared everywhere as a quote from Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), singer and songwriter of the American band Nirvana, whose 1991 album Nevermind brought grunge, a raw, loud style of rock, into the mainstream. It has not been found in his interviews, his lyrics or Journals, the notebooks published in 2002. The idea is much older: the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that wanting to be someone other than yourself is a form of despair.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

No one is afraid of heights, they're afraid of falling down.

This saying is widely credited to Kurt Cobain, the singer of Nirvana, but it has not been found in his interviews, lyrics or published notebooks, so it is best treated as anonymous. Most people feel a natural fear of falling in high places; only when it becomes extreme is it called acrophobia, which affects roughly 2 to 5 per cent of people. In 1960 Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk showed that most crawling babies would not cross a glass floor over an apparent drop, even when their mothers called.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.

No author is known for this saying; it is usually shared without a name. The idea runs through many traditions. Japanese has nana korobi ya oki, “fall seven times, get up eight”. The Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith put a close version in The Citizen of the World (1760–61), letters supposedly written by a Chinese traveller in England: our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. Because of that invented narrator, the line is still often credited to Confucius.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law and not an accident.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American writer later famous for Walden, wrote this on 11 March 1842 to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men were grieving. In January Thoreau's older brother John had died in his arms of tetanus, an infection that locks the muscles, after a small cut. Weeks later Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever. Thoreau was living in the Emerson household at the time and was close to the boy. The letter goes on: “It is as common as life.”

Henry David Thoreau, letter to Emerson (1842)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology and named the ideas of introversion and extraversion. The sentence comes from the closing chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a partly autobiographical book made with his colleague Aniela Jaffé and published in German in 1962, a year after his death. Looking back, Jung writes that the loneliness he felt as a child never left him, because he was aware of things most people around him did not know or care to know, and held views they would not accept.

Carl JungRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

He who sees too much ends up not fitting anywhere.

No author is known for this line, but the idea is old. In Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC, a prisoner who has only seen shadows on a cave wall is freed and sees the sunlit world; back in the cave, the others laugh and say the journey has ruined his eyes. In Greek myth the Trojan princess Cassandra could see the future but was cursed never to be believed; her own people thought her mad. The Bible's Ecclesiastes puts it most briefly: “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Peace does not come to the man who refuses to declare war on what is destroying him.

The line is often shared online as Seneca's, but it appears nowhere in his surviving works, and its wording is modern. Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65), a Roman Stoic philosopher and adviser to the emperor Nero, wrote often about peace of mind. When his friend Lucilius found that long travels had not lifted his gloom, Seneca told him in Letter 28: “You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” Until you lay down the burden you carry inside, he added, no place will please you.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180 and a Stoic, following the Greek philosophy that places the good life in virtue and self-control. The Meditations are his private notebook, written in Greek during the 170s, partly while he was at war on the Danube frontier; he never meant it for readers. In 10.16 the Greek says, word for word: stop discussing what kind of man a good man is, and be one. The note just before it reminds him how little of his life is left.

Marcus AureliusRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

I turn cruel when I am empty. If I cannot be loved, I must be feared.

No author is known for this line. Both halves echo Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), in which the creature, rejected by everyone including his maker, tells Victor Frankenstein: “I am malicious because I am miserable”, and later, “if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear”. Three centuries earlier, in The Prince (1513), Niccolò Machiavelli advised that a ruler who cannot be both loved and feared is safer being feared. Spoken in the first person, the line sounds closer to Shelley's lonely creature than to Machiavelli's cool political advice.

AnonymousRead card

StillnessLiterature

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

The saying goes back to al-Jahiz (c. 776–868), a master of Arabic prose who grew up poor in Basra, in Iraq, selling fish to help his family. Praising books in a famous passage, he called the book a vessel filled with knowledge, a garden carried in a sleeve and a meadow turned over in the lap, one that speaks for the dead and passes on the words of the living. Later versions put the garden in a pocket. Legend says he died under a fallen pile of books.

Arabic ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

What you sow is what you reap.

Turkish has the proverb in exactly this form; English says “As you sow, so shall you reap.” The image is far older: Cicero's On the Orator (55 BC) records a Roman politician using it as a retort in a debate over a new law, “Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.” About a century later, Paul used it in his Letter to the Galatians. Turkish also has a sharper version, “rüzgâr ekip fırtına biçmek”, to sow the wind and reap the storm: to meet far worse than the harm one did.

Turkish, Biblical, global variants ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

The line is often shared as a saying of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, but no reliable source ties it to him. It is usually credited to Ram Dass, reportedly from his book Be Here Now (1971), though the exact source is unclear. Born Richard Alpert, he taught psychology at Harvard, went to India in 1967 and became a disciple of the guru Neem Karoli Baba. It describes a common experience in meditation: as the mind's chatter settles, you notice sounds and thoughts that were there all along.

Attributed to Ram Dass; reported as from Be Here Now (1971)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Before you and me there were nights and days, and the turning sky was already at its work. Wherever you set your foot upon the earth, it was once the pupil of a lovely eye.

Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was born in Nishapur, north-eastern Iran, and in his lifetime was famous as a mathematician and astronomer: he solved cubic equations with geometry and helped create the Jalali calendar. Later centuries credited him with hundreds of rubais, poems of four lines, many probably by other poets; a modern critical edition counts a version of this one as probably his. Its thought runs through the collection: the dust we walk on was once living people, and the sky turned before us. The translation is our own.

Modern verse after the Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyamRead card