Chris > Chris's Quotes

“Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means,”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“Man is essentially a story-telling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to truth.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them.”
― Aristotle, Ethics

“Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics