Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 6

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StillnessLiterature

I hate those who steal my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

This line, often part of a longer version beginning “My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people”, circulates widely under Nietzsche's name, but no one has found it in his books, notes or letters. Solitude was real in his life, though. Ill health ended his professorship at Basel in 1879, and for ten years he lived alone on his pension, spending summers in the Swiss Alps and winters in Genoa, Nice and Turin. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) he urges readers to flee into solitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessLiterature

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

This is maxim 12 of 'Maxims and Arrows', the opening section of Twilight of the Idols, which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in just over a week in 1888 at Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps. He ends it with a jab: people do not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does. The line became famous through the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi camps. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946) he wrote that prisoners who had a reason to live, such as someone waiting for them, held out better.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows' §12Read card

StillnessLiterature

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

This is the whole of aphorism 483, 'Enemies of Truth', in Human, All Too Human (1878). It was Friedrich Nietzsche's first book of aphorisms, short self-contained remarks, and appeared after his break with his former idol, the composer Richard Wagner. Near the end of the book he defines a conviction as the belief that, on some point, one holds the absolute truth. A lie can be caught and corrected; a conviction stops a person looking further. A decade later, in The Antichrist, he put it bluntly: convictions are prisons.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

Man would rather will nothingness than not will.

In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche asks why ascetic ideals, ideals of self-denial such as poverty, humility and chastity, have meant so much to people. His answer: we cannot bear suffering that seems pointless, and would rather give it any meaning, even one that turns us against life, than none. This horror of emptiness, he says, is the basic fact of the human will: it needs a goal. The sentence appears near the essay's start and again as the book's last line.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

The poison from which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong, and they do not call it poison.

From aphorism 19, 'Evil', in The Gay Science (1882), 'gay' here meaning joyful. Nietzsche asks readers to look at the lives of the best and most fruitful people and nations: could a tree meant to grow proudly skywards do without bad weather and storms? Envy, hostility and hardship, he suggests, may be among the conditions of great growth. He knew hardship himself: illness had forced him to give up his professorship at Basel in 1879. Later he put it more briefly: what does not kill me makes me stronger.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

This line is not in Nietzsche's writings. Quote Investigator, a website that traces famous sayings, found no link to him before a 2003 internet post, a century after his death. The image is far older: in 1813 the French writer Germaine de Staël wrote that life can feel like a ball where you cannot hear the music, so the dancing looks mad. The Times called a version an old proverb in 1927, and comedian George Carlin spread it in 1997. Nietzsche, though, loved dance as an image of free thought.

After Germaine de Staël, De l'Allemagne (1813); credited to Nietzsche much laterRead card

StillnessLiterature

He who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.

From section 7 of On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), the second of Friedrich Nietzsche's four Untimely Meditations. Then a young professor at Basel, teaching classical philology, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, he argued that his age was drowning in history. Scholarship that only takes things apart, he wrote, destroys the illusions that love and faith live on, and leaves those who practise it tired of life. He puts this sentence in quotation marks but does not say whose words they are.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Still waters run deep.

The Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, writing about Alexander the Great in the 1st century AD, recorded ‘the deepest rivers flow with the least sound’ as a proverb from Bactria, in Central Asia. Today the saying usually means that a quiet person may have deep feelings or a sharp mind. It was once a warning too: a calm surface can hide danger. The French still say there is no worse water than sleeping water, and a Turkish saying warns that a meek, downcast look can hide mischief.

English proverb; Latin origin: Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labunturRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

The earliest known version is by the English clergyman Thomas Fuller, in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a book on the Holy Land: ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth’. His example was David, whose own men were ready to stone him shortly before he was proclaimed king. The worst trouble, Fuller meant, often comes just before relief. As astronomy it is not quite right: the night is darkest around its middle, and the sky begins to pale an hour or more before sunrise.

English proverb, recorded by Thomas Fuller (1650)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” It is a popular modern saying often attributed to Confucius, but no reliable passage in the Confucian classics has been identified as its source.

Confucius (551–479 BC) was a teacher and official in the state of Lu, in eastern China. He wrote no book; his followers collected his sayings in the Analects. This line has not been traced to the Analects or any other early text, and seems to be a modern saying that borrowed a famous name. A genuine Analects line has a similar spirit: those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and those who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

Anonymous modern saying; commonly misattributed to ConfuciusRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.

The line is in Book 7 of the Analects, the recorded sayings of Confucius (551–479 BC), here in the 1861 translation by the Scottish scholar James Legge. ‘Superior man’ renders junzi, literally a ruler's son, a word for a nobleman; Confucius used it for anyone noble in character. The ‘mean man’ is the xiaoren, the ‘small person’. Elsewhere Confucius says the superior man's mind is set on what is right, the mean man's on gain: so one has nothing to fear, while the other always fears loss.

Confucius, The AnalectsRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

Though often credited to the Buddha, the saying appears in no Buddhist scripture. It looks like a modern reworking of a line by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island. In ‘El Dorado’, an essay collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), he wrote that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour’: we are happiest while we still have something to strive for. The Buddha, by contrast, taught a path with a clear goal: freedom from suffering.

Buddhist proverb, attributed to the BuddhaRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Empty vessels make the most noise.

The image comes from everyday life: tap an empty pot or barrel and it rings loudly, while a full one gives only a dull thud. Applied to people, it means that those who know least often talk most. It was already an old saying around 1599, when a boy in Shakespeare's Henry V, watching the boastful soldier Pistol, remarks that the empty vessel makes the greatest sound. Turkish has ‘Boş başak dik durur’: an empty ear of wheat stands upright, while a full one bows its head.

English proverb (16th century)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A problem shared is a problem halved.

The idea is old. The Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes hard times lighter by dividing and sharing them, and in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1625) Francis Bacon said that it doubles joys and cuts griefs in half. German has a twin, ‘geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid’: shared sorrow is half sorrow. Turkish says that whoever keeps their trouble to themselves will find no cure for it. In a 2008 study led by the psychologist Simone Schnall, people judged a hill less steep when a friend stood beside them.

English proverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass said this in August 1857 at Canandaigua, New York, at a celebration of the end of slavery in Britain's Caribbean colonies; in the American South, slavery was still legal. He goes on: those who want freedom without protest want crops without ploughing and rain without thunder, and power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle, he said, may be moral or physical, but it must be a struggle. Douglass (c. 1818–1895) was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838 and became a leading voice against slavery.

Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation" speech (1857)Read card

StillnessLanguage

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

Merriam-WebsterRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

The Enchiridion, a handbook of the teachings of the Greek Stoic Epictetus, opens by dividing life in two. Our judgements, intentions, desires and dislikes are up to us. Our body, possessions, reputation and position are not, and treating them as if they were leads to frustration.

Epictetus was born into slavery around AD 50 in Hierapolis, the ancient city beside today's Pamukkale in western Turkey. He spent his youth in Rome as the slave of Epaphroditus, a wealthy former slave who had been secretary to the emperor Nero, studied Stoic philosophy and began to teach after he was freed. When the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome around AD 93, he moved to Nicopolis in north-western Greece and opened a school. He wrote nothing himself. His student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and gathered the key points into the Enchiridion, Greek for “handbook”, something kept ready to hand. Marcus Aurelius thanks his teacher Rusticus for lending him Epictetus's lectures, and the handbook was later adapted for Greek-speaking monasteries and translated into Latin in the 15th century.

EpictetusRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote the Meditations in Greek as private notes to himself, some while on campaign by the Danube. In this passage he is thinking about people who get in his way: they can block an action, he says, but not his intentions, because the mind turns the obstacle into something to work with, such as a chance to practise patience. The card follows Gregory Hays's 2002 translation, and Ryan Holiday's 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way made the line famous.

Marcus AureliusRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

You do not control everything around you. You do control more of your attention, choices and responses than panic usually admits.

The idea is at the heart of Stoicism, the philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BC, and one of its clearest teachers was Epictetus, a freed slave. It was put to a hard test in 1965, when the American pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He had been given Epictetus's handbook as a student at Stanford, and through seven and a half years as a prisoner of war he held on to its lesson: his captors controlled almost everything, but not his judgement or his conduct.

Stoic reflectionRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

One practical Stoic question: is this mine to act on, or only mine to accept? Much anxiety comes from treating both as the same job.

The question goes back to Epictetus, the Stoic teacher who opened his handbook by sorting things into what is up to us and what is not. Psychologists draw a similar line. In their 1984 book on stress, Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman separated problem-focused coping, which tackles the cause of stress, from emotion-focused coping, which eases the feelings. Tackling the problem tends to help when a situation can be changed; after a loss or with a chronic illness, calming the feelings and seeing things differently often helps more.

Stoic reflectionRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cassius speaks these lines in Act 1 of Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare in 1599. He tells Brutus that nothing in the heavens made Caesar great and them his underlings: they allowed it. Many people then believed the stars shaped a person's fate. Today the line is quoted as a call to take charge of your life, and it gave John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars its title. In the play it is flattery with a purpose: Cassius is drawing Brutus into the plot to kill Caesar.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessMind

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946) he argued that no one can take away our freedom to choose our attitude, so the line suits him, yet it has never been found in his writings. The American psychologist Rollo May described this pause between stimulus and response in 1963. Stephen Covey spread the idea, linked to Frankl, in 1989; he later said he had read it in a library book whose author he had forgotten.

Commonly misattributed to Viktor Frankl; wording popularised by later writersRead card

WonderMind

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist who shared the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his work on how people make judgements. The line comes from the chapter on happiness in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He called the effect the focusing illusion: whatever you are thinking about, such as a pay rise or a move, seems to matter more to your happiness than it really does. In a 1998 study, students in the American Midwest expected Californians to be happier because of the weather, yet both groups were about equally satisfied with their lives.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)Read card

WonderPhilosophy

Socrates, the Athenian philosopher who died in 399 BC, left no writings of his own. We know him mainly through his students Plato and Xenophon, and through a comedy that mocked him while he was still alive.

Socrates (about 470–399 BC) taught by asking questions in the streets and squares of Athens, and at about 70 he was tried for impiety and for corrupting the young, and sentenced to death. Plato, his most famous student, made him the main speaker in dozens of dialogues, and Xenophon wrote memoirs of him. The playwright Aristophanes had already mocked him in The Clouds (423 BC) as a crank who teaches young men clever tricks of argument. The three portraits often disagree, and scholars call the difficulty of recovering the real man the 'Socratic problem'. His silence on the page may have been a choice: in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing weakens memory and that a written text cannot answer back when it is questioned.

Philosophy historyRead card