Riley > Riley's Quotes

“For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leibniz: Philosophical Essays

“(T)he philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning , that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
― Henri Bergson

“For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”
― Plato, Theaetetus

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
― Plato, The Republic

“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life”
― Plato

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”
― Albert Camus

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
― James Baldwin

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
― James Baldwin

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. ”
― James Baldwin

“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
― James Baldwin

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time