“Suppose that nothing is “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can get down or up to no other “reality” than just the reality of our drives—for thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another —: is it not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given does not suffice for understanding, on the basis of what is of its own kind, the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world as well?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil forage.com/nietzsche/beyond-…

“So for nearly six months, beginning with Rajab of the year 488 AH (AD 1095), I wavered between the pull of worldly appetites and the calls of the hereafter. In that month the matter passed beyond choice into compulsion, for God locked my tongue so that it was held back from teaching. I would struggle with myself to teach for a single day, to please the hearts of those who came to me, but my tongue would not utter a single word; I simply could not do it. This impediment of the tongue brought on a grief in my heart, and with it my power to digest and my relish of food and drink were lost: I could not swallow a sop of bread in broth, nor digest a single morsel. It went on to weaken my faculties, until the doctors gave up hope of treating me and said: “This is something that has come down upon the heart, and from there it has spread through the constitution. There is no treating it, except by the inmost self finding relief from the anxiety that has befallen it.”” — al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error forage.com/ghazali/deliveran…

““You are great, Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no measure.” And a human being wants to praise you, some small part of your creation—a human being who carries his mortality around with him, carries around the evidence of his sin and the evidence that you “resist the proud.” And yet a human being, some small part of your creation, wants to praise you. You stir us so that praising you is a delight, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Grant me, Lord, to know and understand whether we should first call upon you or praise you, and whether we must first know you or call upon you. But who calls upon you without knowing you? For someone who does not know you may call upon something else in your place. Or rather, are you called upon so that you may be known? Yet “how will they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe without someone to preach?”” — Augustine, Confessions forage.com/augustine/confess…

“Indeed, I cannot wonder enough that a philosopher who had firmly resolved to deduce nothing except from principles known through themselves, and to affirm nothing except what he perceived clearly and distinctly, and who had so often reproached the Scholastics for wanting to explain obscure things by occult qualities, should adopt a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality. What, I ask, does he understand by the union of mind and body? What clear and distinct concept, I say, does he have of a thought most closely united to some tiny portion of quantity? I truly wish he had explained this union through its proximate cause. But he had conceived the mind as so distinct from the body that he could assign no particular cause either of this union or of the mind itself, and he had to have recourse to the cause of the whole universe, that is, to God.” — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics forage.com/spinoza/ethics/#f…

“What seems most distinctive of substance is that, while remaining one and the same in number, it is able to receive contraries. Among the other things, the ones that are not substances, no one could produce anything that, being one in number, is able to receive contraries: for example, a color that is one and the same in number will not be white and black, nor will one and the same action, one in number, be base and worthy; and it is the same with the other things that are not substances. But substance, while remaining one and the same in number, is able to receive contraries. For example, the individual man, being one and the same, becomes pale at one time and dark at another, hot and cold, base and worthy.” — Aristotle, Categories forage.com/aristotle/categor…

“For where is it that you, in practice, take excellence to be equal to everything else, or even superior? But show me a Stoic, if you have one.” — Epictetus, Discourses forage.com/epictetus/discour…

““Let that be our defense, then,” I said, “now that we’ve come back to the subject of poetry: that we had good reason, back then, to send it out of the city, being what it is. The argument compelled us. And let’s tell it further, so that it doesn’t convict us of harshness and boorishness, that there’s an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. There’s ‘the yelping dog that bays at its master,’ and ‘great in the empty chatter of fools,’ and ‘the mob of the overwise that holds sway,’ and ‘the subtle thinkers who are beggars after all,’ and countless other signs of their old opposition. All the same, let it be said that if poetry aimed at pleasure, and imitation, have any argument to offer why they should exist in a well-governed city, we’d be glad to take them back, since we’re well aware of being charmed by it ourselves. But it isn’t right to betray what seems to be true.”” — Plato, Republic forage.com/plato/republic/#f…

“The country was cultivated for pleasure as well as for need; everywhere the useful was also agreeable. The roads were covered, or rather adorned, with carriages of shining shape and material, carrying men and women of singular beauty and drawn swiftly by big red sheep that outran the finest horses of Andalusia, Tetouan and Meknes.” — Voltaire, Candide forage.com/voltaire/candide/…

“Then I said: “Look—I am thrown again into confusion by a still harder perplexity.” “What is it?” she said. “For I already guess what troubles you.” And I said: It seems far too contradictory and conflicting that God foreknows all things and that there is any free will. For if God foresees all things and cannot in any way be deceived, then what providence has foreseen will be must necessarily happen. So if from eternity he foreknows not only the deeds of human beings but also their plans and wishes, there will be no free will; for no deed and no wish of any kind can exist except what divine providence, which cannot be deceived, has perceived beforehand. For if things can be twisted in a direction other than the one foreseen, there will no longer be firm foreknowledge of the future, but rather uncertain opinion—and to believe that of God I judge impious. Nor do I approve the argument by which some believe they can untie this knot of the question.” — Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy forage.com/boethius/consolat…

“The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. Concrete freedom, however, consists in this. Personal individuality and its particular interests have their complete development and the recognition of their right for themselves (in the system of the family and of civil society). But they also, of their own accord, partly pass over into the interest of the universal, and partly recognize this universal, knowingly and willingly, as their own substantial spirit, and are active on its behalf as their final end. Thus the universal neither holds good nor is accomplished without particular interest, knowledge and will; nor do individuals live merely for particular interest as private persons without at the same time willing in and for the universal and acting with conscious awareness of this end.” — G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right forage.com/hegel/philosophy-…

“Consider the paramount interest, pressing and constant, that we have in preserving our bodies and educating our souls. Consider the special opportunities each of us has here to experiment ceaselessly on ourselves and on others, and the palpable harm by which any flaw in a medical or educational practice shows itself and is paid for. When we think of all this, we are astounded at the crudeness, and above all at the persistence, of the errors. Their origin could easily be traced to our stubbornness in treating the living as inert and in thinking all reality, however fluid, in the form of a solid fixed once and for all. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to understand life.” — Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution forage.com/bergson/creative-…

“The relation between the aim of these people and the aim of the Lawgiver is like that of a man who goes to a skilled physician. The physician aims to preserve the health of all people and to rid them of diseases. He lays down for them precepts that all can assent to, on the need to use the things that preserve their health and remove their diseases and to avoid their opposites. For he cannot make them all physicians, since the one who knows by demonstrative methods the things that preserve health and remove disease is the physician. Then this man sets himself before the people and tells them, “These methods that this physician has laid down for you are not true,” and sets about refuting them until they stand refuted in the people’s eyes. Or he says, “They have interpretations,” and the people neither understand these interpretations nor come through them to any assent in practice.” — Averroes, The Decisive Treatise forage.com/averroes/decisive…

“If we compare with this the inhospitable conduct of the civilized states of our part of the world, especially the commercial ones, the injustice they display in visiting foreign lands and peoples (which for them amounts to the same thing as conquering them) goes to terrifying lengths. America, the lands of Africa, the Spice Islands, the Cape and so on were, when discovered, lands that belonged to no one, as far as they were concerned; for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. Into East India (Hindustan), under the pretext of merely intending to set up trading posts, they brought foreign troops, and with them the oppression of the native inhabitants, the incitement of its various states to far-reaching wars, famine, rebellion, treachery, and whatever else the litany of all the evils that weigh on the human race may contain.” — Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace forage.com/kant/perpetual-pe…

“Now see whether it’s possible in the same way to possess knowledge without having it. Suppose someone hunted wild birds—pigeons or some other kind—and kept them in an aviary he’d built at home. In one sense we might say he always has them, because he possesses them, mightn’t we?” — Plato, Theaetetus forage.com/plato/theaetetus/…

“So we can divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or kinds, distinguished by their different degrees of force and vividness. The less forceful and lively ones are commonly called Thoughts or Ideas. The other kind has no name in our language, or in most others, I suppose because nobody needed a general term for them except for philosophical purposes. So let us take a small liberty and call them Impressions, using the word in a somewhat unusual sense. By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will.” — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding forage.com/hume/enquiry/#f45

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