Time by minutes slips away | first the hour and then the day | small
the daily loss appears| yet it soon amounts to years.
the daily loss appears| yet it soon amounts to years.
Inscribed over the door of the Indianapolis Public Library in Indiana
Thomism is the philosophy of common sense. It starts from the things we see, thus from realities, and recognizes, by trying to penetrate and comprehend them, the essence, of that which is. It seeks in the world, the reality of the Eternal principles, because what has been lost to the world and is missed most by it, are the fundamental of humanity, such as, justice, right, duty, virtue, authority and promotion of the common weal.
Being discontented with prevailing opinion is scarcely confined to Thomists. It is in a way the mark of the philosopher.
Essay: Implicit Philosophy
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.
Perhaps philosophers should strangle their wives. The name of Socrates’ wife has passed into the language as that of an ignorant shrew. Philosophy is an unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession. The body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation. The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light. Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme. Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.
“[T]he point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
“The Internet has had an enormous effect on my work and on my life. I am able to communicate nearly instantly with people all over the world and the access to information [it provides] enables me to find out what I need to know much more rapidly and efficiently than I ever could by going to a library.”
[The Internet] It’s multiplied my productivity by a factor of about five…
Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and decide is valuable.
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
The Listener, 1978
You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?
Movie: Fight Club
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate - that’s my philosophy.
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
Book: Walden
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The basis of my existence is weird: whenever I ponder this life, however superficially, I get struck by an immediate lack of understanding, a hopeless, unfilled amazement.
“[We need the] understanding that out of the 20th century revolutions in physics, the current understanding we have that our scientific concepts are no more god given absolute ways of viewing the world than religions are, but are themselves human products and have to be understood honestly as tools, which don’t work for everything, may allow us to have a health care system in which the contemplative methods that help us take care of ourselves are brought in to compliment [traditional western mechanistic medicine].”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/02/meditation_self_regulation/
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/02/meditation_self_regulation/
Lecture - online video - Meditation and the Self-Regulation of Learning: A Link Between Health Science and Religion?
The sense of being the fixed, independent, self sufficient, static self is delusional.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/01/high_ed_meditation/index.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/01/high_ed_meditation/index.html
Lecture - Wisdom and Meditation Liberate the Human Being in Indo-Tibetan Thinking
Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosphical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound.
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics. But you don’t do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, crusades and jihads, holy wars and purges and pogroms, the Inquisition and burning of witches.
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
What I find worth exclaiming about right now is the continuing applicability to the human condition, years after free will has ceased to be a novelty, of what jazzed Dudley Prince back to life, of what is now known generally as Kilgore’s Creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
Book: Timequake
In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
Book: Thief of Time
Love conquers all. Faith can move mountains. Love will always find a way. Where there is life there is hope. Oh well…they gotta tell you something.
Movie: Monster (Screenplay by Patty Jenkins)
This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, “We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”
Book: Hogfather
In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.
Book: “El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins” by Jorge Luis Borges
‘Life in this world,’ he said, ‘is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say humbly, “Go on, do Deformed Rabbit… it’s my favourite.”’
Book: Small Gods
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
[Didactylos’] philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, “You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”
Book: Small Gods
naelyn /
art, existence, life, mathematics, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, science
#314
Mathematics, philosophy, religion, psychology, mysticism, science, art (and the other means of communication), all translate life and existence into their own comprehensible language, but a translation never captures the true essence of what it seeks to translate. Remember that and life can speak without words.