- Empirical philosophers are like ants – they simply accumulate observations. Rationalists resemble “spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance.” Yet the true natural philosopher is like a bee, which “gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.” For Francis Bacon, observations had to be digested and transformed within the human mind.
Sense of Things?” Philosophia Christi 18, no. 2 (2016): 395-408. Quoted
passages from Francis Bacon's The New Organon (1620).
- Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
- Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go though it, you don’t understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don’t understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn’t bother you any more.
- I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design. With respect to Design, i feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire...[a] shot.
- I don't think I really know why I took the course I did. Any story I would tell is likely to be fiction, merely what I want to believe.
- They don't like being cooked.
- We make ourselves out of what we're made of.
philosopher
- One simple decision can get you in, but no simple decision can get you out.
- What ultimately justifies any mode of description of the world is its utility in enabling us to cope with our problems.
- When fact becomes myth, print the myth.
- You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
- As time goes on, things do get made up.
- Love is on the path from not-having to having, something that “disappears” when the object is attained. This does not change even if you see love as renewable upon it’s demise. This picture is of love as oscillation. But this is a superficial view of it. The real thing, the pure essence of which is desire, is something else.
- All I was doing was trying to get home from work.
- Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And he wasn’t sure about the universe.”
- The way that you think about something matters.
- We each occupy one place and take it for the whole.
- You can never get enough of what you don't really need.
- Nothing is so difficult...as to get people to be sympathetic enough to what one is saying to understand what it is.
- Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.
- People make their own histories, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
- How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?
- Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.
- The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions...
- I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it...
- The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- Advice is given freely because so much of it is worthless.
- Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.
- Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little....
- The answers we get follow from the questions we put.
- An organism is an embodied theory about its environment.
- So you want this fucking job?
he wanted to run for President
- Don't let the facts interfere with the truth.
- The Critics' rules were made after the poems. The rules of architecture after ye houses, Grammar after language and governments go per hookum & crookum & then we demonstrate it per bookum.
- He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses.
- Of the things I am about to recount, I do not know whether I remember them, or whether they were merely things that were told to me.
Relating to My Life, from Philosophy 3, Lecture 20, UC Berkeley, Joseph
Campbell, lecturer
- There is one constant in life––change.
- Change is an illusion.
- Popular sovereignty exists only on election day.
- Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
- SCHOPENHAUER famously called the mind-body problem a “Weltknoten,” or “world-knot,” and he was surely right.
- Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.
- Politically, I feel more governed than self-governing, and this is one reason why I think more warmly of limited government than of popular government.
- There is no success or failure in Nature.
- This is our paradox: no course of action could be determined by [an expression for] a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule (italics added).
Introduction to Linguistic Philosophy, I.E. Mackenzie
- There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
- If you know a country’s geography, you can understand and predict its foreign policy.
- You can only be right for a time. History doesn’t stand still.
- Protagoras did not know if the gods exist, but he held in any case they ought to be worshiped. Philosophy, according to him, had nothing edifying to teach, and for the survival of morals we must rely upon the thoughtlessness of the majority and their willingness to believe what they had been taught.
- Death awareness is the price we pay for self-awareness.
- [The] passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Erotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles––the trappings of religion––confuse as much as they help.
- Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
- The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.
- Sometimes we need to speak oddly to see clearly.
- In varying degrees, the authority of the dharma was replaced by the authority of the guru, who came, in some traditions, to assume the role of the Buddha himself.
- The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
- History is paradoxically both real and ideal, simultaneously other to interpretation and yet dependent on how it is construed.
- How can we specify what we know without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know without having specified what we know?
- The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
- Montaigne, recognizing that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one has to make oneself up from moment to moment.
- The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.
- Study everything, join nothing.
- You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
book, What's a Dog For?
- I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am.
- Perception is externally driven hallucination.
- Digressions [in writing], incontestably, are the sunshine.
- God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.
- The Caliph ordered the destruction of the library of Alexandria, arguing that either the books said the same thing as the Koran, in which case they were superfluous, or else they said something different, in which case they were wrong and harmful.
- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
and oft quoted "Anna Karenina Principle"
- Zen: ALL, NOW.
- A thief running away like mad from a ferocious watch-dog may be a splendid example of Zen.
- If it's good, it's mine. If it's bad, it's a fake.
works and the numerous fakes that were circulating.
- It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
- When discourse is responsible for reality and not merely a reflection of it, then whose discourse prevails makes all the difference.
- Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
- Life is graded on the curve. It’s not how big you are, how strong you are, how smart you are. It’s how good you are at the things that count relative to the people around you.
Evolution, and Culture
- There is a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having a little money in the bank.
- ...wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.
- Don’t bother to talk to us about right and wrong, for as you know, such conversations only exist between equals. The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
The Peloponnesian War, Book V
- It is in your interest to recognize what is fair and right. You should not destroy what is our common protection, because you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal as the heaviest vengeance as an example for the world to meditate upon.
The Peloponnesian War, Book V
- ...vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men [sic] react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defense of what they have so laboriously learned.
- There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.
- We talk and talk while our life burns. (In Buddhism, the body is called "a burning house.")
- Personalities in history matter; but as Marx said, they do not matter in the way they are intended to matter.
- People who worry about population usually worry that the wrong kind of people are having too many children.
- The fair nymphs of this isle [Manhattan] are in a wonderful tribulation, as the fresh meat our men have got here have made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished [raped], and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don't bear them with the proper resignation....
Campaign of the Revolutionary War
- We are in the middle of a world revolution, and I don't mean Communism. The revolution I'm talking about is that of the little, poor people all over the world. They're beginning to learn what there is in life, and to learn what they are missing.
having been sent by President Truman to assist in bringing a
reconciliation between the Communists and the Nationalists (he failed)
- When Thoreau lay dying, he was asked if he had made his peace with God; he answered: "We have never quarreled."
- IN THE WORLD OF REALITY, THERE IS NO SELF, NO OTHER THAN SELF.
on Zen
Commenting on the above, R. H. Blyth, in his Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. I, states the following: "To say this is easy, to believe it intellectually is not difficult. It has an emotional, a poetical appeal which few can withstand. With a full belly, a bank balance, when all is going well, such a doctrine will be readily adopted. But when food is scarce, when a man has lost his job, in hours of boredom, when children die, and our own death is not far off,––can we then rejoice with those that rejoice and mourn with those that mourn? In my own case, I must say that nothing makes me more contented with my lot than to see the sufferings of others, to find my children are cleverer and prettier than those of my colleagues. How far indeed is this from the lines above."
- Had the Constitution been framed & recommended by an obscure individual, instead of the body possessing public respect & confidence, there cannot be a doubt that altho' it would have stood by the identical words, it would have commanded little attention from those who now admire its wisdom.
- The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
- In the society of states, there is no 911.
- How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
- But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
- Many people who gain recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, only to be catapulted into new social realities over which they have less control and manage badly. Indeed, the annals of the famous and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and victims of their life courses.
- Anybody can become angry––that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way––that is not within everybody"s power and is not easy.
- Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
- Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
- Imagine you were an idiot. Then imagine you were a member of Congress. Oh, wait a minute. I just repeated myself.
- "...part of the real work of any discipline is its own perpetuation” (Jeanne Fahnestock) which may require unresolved controversy.
and Literary Argument.”
- [He is] unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
- It's true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?
- I may have my faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.
mentioned in her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook"
- No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
- I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
- I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.
May 1919 War Office
- Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.
of Nature
- Over the whole earth––this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song––an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man––man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.
- For every human problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
panned out.
- It is quite impossible to stop the progress of language –– it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible.
- [Trying to fix a language was as futile a gesture as trying to distinguish] a grove [which] in the agitation of a storm [cannot] be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. To enchain a syllable and lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride.
Seth Lerer
- The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
- If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
- The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need...But could anything seriously be done about it?
- Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover the losses due to mismanagement.
- Because the Chief Powhatan gave “noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers” to the English governor of Jamestown upon request that certain of the settlers who had sought food from the Indians the winter before be returned, the governor had an Indian village burned, cut down the corn around it, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, forced the tribe’s queen and her children into a boat, and then threw the children overboard and took sport in “shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water.”
- An Episcopalian divine once told the Pope that the only difference between their denominations was that “the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong.”
- For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?
- The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the maximum amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
- None of us is as small as all of us.
- The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
- There are known knowns. These are the things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’t know.
- Don’t give me the peace that passeth understanding, give me understanding.
- Being is an issue for one.
- How one encounters reality is a choice.
- Truth is something that happens to an idea.
- Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they might be capable of.
- Wall Street is like a mine—a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.
- Get your facts straight, then you can distort them as you please.
- Always do right. This will gratify some and astonish the rest.
- The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the same as the difference between lighting and the lightning bug.
- Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate [both] the question and the questioner.
- When the Scarecrow asked the Wizard for a brain, the Wizard told him he could not give him a brain, but he could give him a diploma from the University of Kansas.
- If everything were transparent, there would be no ideologies.
- Taking life seriously requires taking death seriously.
- My heart was on fire. I simply picked up a pail of water to douse the flames. I want no medals.
resistance in Belgium during WWII
- If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
- The big-time speculators on Wall Street may be pillars in the church; they may hob-knob with college presidents and sit on commencement platforms, but they are plunderers.
- I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a little feast….
- Paradoxically, the richer the nation, the more apparent is the inability of its average inhabitants to survive unaided and alone.
- The past comes lose in disconnected fragments.
- Freedom [should not be] conceived negatively as exemption from social influences or situational constraints. Rather…positively as the exercise of self-influence to bring about desired results.
- It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.
- Scripture is a book about going to Heaven. It’s not a book about how the heavens go.
science)
- I think, therefore I am.
- I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.
- Asked why he robbed banks: ‘‘Cause that’s where the money is."
- Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.
- Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
- Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
- Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
- Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
- I’m so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a word I’m saying.
- Money is a blessing that is of no advantage to us except when we part with it.
- Samuel Johnson (an Englishman) once chastised his biographer Boswell (a Scot) that, unlike the Scots, who ate oats, the English only fed oats to their horses. Boswell responded that that might be why the English have better horses and the Scots have better men.
- Success in life is the ability to move from one mistake to another without loosing enthusiasm.
- On the life of a politician: “He is asked to stand, wants to sit, and expected to lie.”
- The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- There is no hell. Sinners go to heaven too, but they hate it.
- Fret’em and fret’em, and chew’em and choke’em.
an engagement with a Confederate column
- History is bunk.
- [History] A fable agreed upon.
- [History] That huge Mississippi of falsehood.
- A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
- A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
- The most incomprehensible thing about the [physical] universe is that it is comprehensible.
- Interests are always served by definitions: the only question is which interests.
- Confusion conditions activity, which conditions consciousness, which conditions embodied personality, which conditions sensory experiences, which conditions impact, which conditions mood, which conditions craving, which conditions clinging, which conditions becoming, which conditions birth, which conditions aging and death.
- Techniques of mass persuasion [can turn] adolescents…into Red Guards or Hitler Youth or pop fans.
- People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced—all the mysteries of art—will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it.
- Nothing is virtuous but 'self-denial'.
- In taking life for granted, we fail to notice it.
- Necessity, they say, is [the] mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestion.
- Even if it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is better to know and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we find comfortable.
- Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political life in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly I have achieved practically nothing.
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, 1969
- There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.
- Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head.
- Last week, I saw a citation from some English priest of the eighteenth century who worked in a leper colony and was so horrified to see those mutilated creatures still coupling that he remarked, ‘Sometimes I think that God was not in a serious mood when he invented sex!"
Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose
- Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
- The greatest enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths.
- It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
- When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
- The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.
of giving away one’s wealth
- To write is to compose a world as well as view one.
- You know, if I hadn’t gotten into trouble by getting into politics, I would have made a hell of a good piano player in a whore house.
- Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
- There are only the pursued, the pursing, the busy, and the tired.
- Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
- Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.
- Death is when the monsters get you.
- When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
- The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.
- A human being is a deciding being.
- I intend to live forever. So far, so good.