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So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practising philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet … And so gentlemen … whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.
Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time.
We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truths.
There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.
What is declared obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so.
Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.
Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false.
Under the influence of passing moods, our critics may have fumbled towards conclusions. They may have acted from impulse and prejudice, and used their status to ennoble their hunches.
A bad thought delivered authoritatively, though without evidence of how it was put together, can for a time carry all the weight of a sound one.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
The validity of an idea or action is determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled but by whether it obeys the rules of logic.
‘a sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady’.
We were to cease acting on first impulses, and instead investigate the rationality of our desires according to a method of questioning
Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.
We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand,
if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?
The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to remarkable joy.
expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one.
for Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true needs, levels of consumption would be destroyed by greater self-awareness and appreciation of simplicity. Epicurus would not have been perturbed:
Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure. But at the same time: It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas
at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
The angry hereby appeal to a predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty, the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by passionate feelings which reason neither identifies with nor can be held responsible for.
if we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger.
Our frustrations are tempered by what we understand we can expect from the world, by our experience of what it is normal to hope for.
Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.
Lebanese Mentality
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die. Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. Reckon on everything, expect everything.
When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us:
For example, when a strenuous gentleman is exercising himself by swinging lead weights, when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunting; and whenever he releases his pent-up breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy, high-pitched tones.
Similar to gyms nowadays
An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it … there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The one alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.
We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.
in mighty natural phenomena lie reminders of all that we are powerless to change, of all that we must accept.
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
The happiest life is to be without thought. – Sophocles
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.
Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance? After all, they … were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.
Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country.
Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto. I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.
If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life. Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment. There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market:
writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
There are authors too clever for our own good. Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word. Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in their successors.
A commentary on a book written by someone else, though technically laborious to produce, requiring hours of research and exegesis, is immune from the most cruel attacks that can befall original works. Commentators may be criticized for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers; they cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves
A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him.
‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’
If you wish to draw pleasure out of life, You must attach value to the world.
(Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be what they are not.)
‘The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,’
