100 Philosophical Quotes

O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee , has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty . how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring)

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light -Aristotle

The mind is everything; what you think you become!

Is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

The hoodlum-occultist is “sociopathic” enough to, see through the conventional charade, the social mythology of his species. “They’re all sheep,” he thinks. “Marks. Suckers. Waiting to be fleeced.” He has enough contact with some more-or-less genuine occult tradition to know a few of the gimmicks by which “social consciousness,” normally conditioned consciousness, can be suspended. He is thus able to utilize mental brutality in place of the simple physical brutality of the ordinary hooligan. He is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar. He is stupid because spending your life terrorizing and exploiting your inferiors is a dumb and boring existence for anyone with more than five billion brain cells. Can you imagine Beethoven ignoring the heavenly choirs his right lobe could hear just to pound on the wall and annoy the neighbors? Gödel pushing aside his sublime mathematics to go out and cheat at cards? Van Gogh deserting his easel to scrawl nasty caricatures in the men’s toilet? Mental evil is always the stupidest evil because the mind itself is not a weapon but a potential paradise. Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them. Genuine occult initiation confers “the philosopher’s stone,” “the gold of the wise” and “the elixir of life,” all of which are metaphors for the capacity to greet life with the bravery and love and gusto that it deserves. By throwing this away to indulge in spite, malice and the small pleasure of bullying the credulous, the mindwarper proves himself a fool and a dolt. And the psychic terrorist, besides being a jerk, is always a liar and a fraud. Healing is easier (and more fun) than cursing, to begin with, and cursing usually backfires or misfires. The mindwarper doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to think he’s omnipotent.

It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.

Our desire to preserve is a form of denial about our own mortality. The fact that art can indure longer than people has lead some to seek a form of proxy-immortality through it. If we accept that art is mortal too, and that nothing is truly permanent, maybe we can see more clearly where the value of art and life is to be fount - in experiencing them.

Certainly, one of the greatest achievements of the human intellectual spirit was the Arabic Translation Movement. Over the course of about 100 years, virtually the entire Greek Scientific and philosophical corpus was either translated or summarized into Arabic (McGinnis, 10).

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life

If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.

Confucius say ... "He who sleep with itchy butt wake with smelly finger.

Ce n'est pas le chemin qui est difficile, c'est le difficile qui est le chemin.

It is 100 years since John Dewey began arguing for the kind of change that would move schools away from authoritarian classrooms with abstract notions to environments in which learning is achieved through experimentation, practice and exposure to the real world. I, for one, believe the computer makes Dewey’s vision far more accessible epistemologically. It also makes it politically more likely to happen, for where Dewey had nothing but philosophical arguments, the present day movement for change has an army of agents. The ultimate pressure for the change will be child power.

Finding such a duality turns out to be totally logical. Discoveries of the past 100 years have shown that duality is ubiquitous in all the workings of nature. Duality is in no way unique to the potential duality that we seek for the origins of our thoughts. The formal search for a duality of mind/brain goes back at least to the writings of the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes.

Many ask: “Why are we so insincere, why are we so hypocrites?”. Well, it is because this is how human nature works. If there was a time and a place where human beings were 100% of the time honest, who always said what they had in mind and who didn’t care to cover their shortcomings by displaying a better persona than the “real” one, it is long since gone, wiped out from the relentless force of natural selection.

William James (1842-1910) was the first philosopher in America to gain universal celebrity. The hardheaded practical wisdom of Benjamin Franklin could hardly be termed a philosophy; from an entirely different perspective, the obfuscatory maunderings of Emerson did not count as such, either. Something with a bit more intellectual rigor of the English or German sort was needed if Americans were not to feel that they were anything but the ruthless money-grubbing barbarians they in fact were and are. James filled the bill. His younger contemporary George Santayana (1863-1952) was considerably more brilliant and scintillating, but for regular, 100 percent Americans he had considerable drawbacks. In the first place, he was a foreigner, born in Spain, even though his Boston upbringing and Harvard professorship would otherwise have given him the stamp of approval. Moreover, he was not merely suspiciously interested in art and poetry (The Sense of Beauty [1896], Three Philosophical Poets [1910]), but he actually wrote poetry himself! No, he would never do. James, on the other hand, was just the sort of philosopher suited to the American bourgeoisie. His chief mission, expressed from one book to the next, was to protect their piety from the hostile forces of science and skepticism-an eminently laudable and American goal.

It was an excellent place to be if you wanted to hear crowds of wretched philosophers heaping abuse on one another—an endless number of historians reading out their imbecilic writings—innumerable poets reciting their drivel to the wild applause of other poets—gaggles of magicians showing their tricks—throngs of fortune-tellers telling fortunes—countless lawyers perverting justice—or armies of peddlers hawking whatever rubbish came to hand. . . . —DIO THE GOLDEN-TONGUED, C. A.D. 100 ONCE

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

Ergoloid mesylates (Hydergine) Developed by Albert Hofmann and marketed without FDA approval as a neuroprotective “smart drug,” ergoloid mesylates is reportedly comparable at standard doses to microdoses of LSD. It’s only available on prescription in most Western countries, but you may be able to buy it online elsewhere. 2C-B-FLY Active even at sub-milligram doses, the effects of 2C-B-FLY have been likened to mescaline and MDA (MDMA’s more potent, more psychedelic predecessor). Microdoses of less than 100 μg (0.1 mg) may enhance motivation, empathy, creativity, and philosophical or abstract thinking. 2C-B-FLY is unscheduled in the U.S. but may be considered an illegal analog of 2C-B. In Canada, it’s a Schedule III substance. In any case, it’s widely available online.

Or take school attendance. Everybody seems to have different ideas on how to raise it. We should pay for uniforms. Advance school fees on credit. Offer free meals. Install toilets. Raise public awareness of the value of education. Hire more teachers. And on and on. All of these suggestions sound perfectly logical. Thanks to RCTs, however, we know that $100 worth of free meals translates into an additional 2.8 years of educational attainment – three times as much as free uniforms. Speaking of proven impact, deworming children with intestinal complaints has been shown to yield 2.9 years of additional schooling for the absurdly small investment of $10 worth of treatment. No armchair philosopher could have predicted that, but since this finding was revealed, tens of millions of children have been dewormed.

LEADING LESSONS Use your fears; don’t let them direct or define you. Fear sends your brain a message that it’s time to make a decision--like when I decided I would ride that coaster. You can also decide to do nothing; you can stand watching the world zip by from the sidelines. I choose to see my fears as a green light. They mean go, not stop, and you’re always in the driver’s seat. Don’t give fear any more power than it already has. As I said, I was often afraid of failure. But instead of letting the fear keep me from reaching my goals, I let it propel me. In the movie After Earth, Will Smith’s character states that fear is simply made up by our own imaginations. “Danger is real, but fear is a choice.” Who knew Will was such a gifted philosopher? I agree 100 percent. Why is one person afraid of something and another other person isn’t? We’re all humans, but we’ve all had different experiences and therefore we have different associations. It’s personal. The possibility of freedom exists wherever fear lies. When you realize that it’s you who is creating this fear, the fear loses its ability to control you.

One of the things that struck him about the city was its heedlessness of Time. On every side he saw people spending it without adequate return. Perhaps he was young and doctrinaire: but he devised this theory for himselfall time is wasted that does not give you some awareness of beauty or wonder. In other words, "the days that make us happy make us wise," he said to himself, quoting Masefield's line. On that principle, he asked, how much time is wasted in this city? Well, here are some six million people. To simplify the problem (which is permitted to every philosopher) let us (he said) assume that 2,350,000 of those people have spent a day that could be called, on the whole, happy: a day in which they have had glimpses of reality; a day in which they feel satisfaction. (That was, he felt, a generous allowance. ) Very well, then, that leaves 3,650,000 people whose day has been unfruitful: spent in uncongenial work, or in sorrow, suffering, and talking nonsense. This city, then, in one day, has wasted 10,000 years, or 100 centuries. One hundred centuries squandered in a day! It made him feel quite ill, and he tore up the scrap of paper on which he had been figuring.

Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

DEONTOLOGY AND CONCEQUENTIALISM, A NOVEL APPROACH: Consequentialism and Deontology (Deontological Ethics) are two contrasting categories of Normative Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental principles that determine the morality of human actions (or non-actions). Their supposed difference is that while Consequentialism determines if an action is morally right or wrong by examining its consequences, Deontology focuses on the action itself, regardless of its consequences. To the hypothetical question “Should I do this man a little injustice, if by this I could save the whole humanity from torture and demise?”, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a pure deontologist (absolutist) answers: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (Do justice even if the whole world would perish). Superficially, it seems that a decent deontologist don’t care about consequences whatsoever. His/her one and only duty is to invariably obey to pre-existing, universal moral rules without exceptions: “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “do not use another human as a means to an end”, and so on. At this point I would like to present my thesis on this subject. The central idea here is that deontological ethics only appears to be indifferent to the consequences of an action. In fact, it is only these very consequences that determine what our moral rules and ethical duties should be. For example, the moral law “do not kill”, has its origin to the dire consequences that the killing of another human being brings about; for the victim (death), the perpetrator (often imprisonment or death) and for the whole humanity (collapse of society and civilization). Let us discuss the well-worn thought experiment of the mad axeman asking a mother where their young children are, so he can kill them. We suppose that the mother knows with 100% certainty that she can mislead him by lying and she can save her children from certain death (once again: supposing that she surely knows that she can save her children ONLY by lying, not by telling the truth or by avoiding to answer). In this thought experiment the hard deontologist would insist that it is immoral to lie, even if that would lead to horrible consequences. But, I assert that this deontological inflexibility is not only inhuman and unethical, it is also outrightly hypocritical. Because if the mother knows that their children are going to be killed if she tells the truth (or does not answer) and they are going to be saved if she tells a harmless lie, then by telling the truth she disobeys the moral law “do not kill/do not cause the death of an innocent”, which is much worse than the moral rule “do not lie”. The fact that she does not kill her children with her own hands is completely irrelevant. She could have saved them without harming another human, yet she chose not to. So the absolutist deontologist chooses actively to disobey a much more important moral law, only because she is not the immediate cause, but a cause via a medium (the crazy axeman in this particular thought experiment). So here are the two important conclusions: Firstly, Deontology in normative ethics is in reality a “masked consequentialism”, because the origin of a moral law is to be found in its consequences e.g. stealing is generally morally wrong, because by stealing, someone is deprived of his property that may be crucial for his survival or prosperity. Thus, the Deontology–Consequentialism dichotomy is a false one. And secondly, the fact that we are not the immediate “vessel” by which a moral rule is broken, but we nevertheless create or sustain a “chain of events” that will almost certainly lead to the breaking of a moral law, does surely not absolve us and does not give us the right to choose the worst outcome. Mister Immanuel Kant would avoid doing an innocent man an injustice, yet he would choose to lead billions of innocent people to agonizing death.

Only a tiny percentage of people in the world care about moral theory in the sense I have been discussing, whereas 100 percent of the people in the world like stories. Most moral insights come from stories, but it is the special virtue of the philosopher to organize those insights

- Anyway, I don't believe every cloud has a silver lining. - Why? - They don't. - But philosophically? - No, some things are 100 percent total shit.

In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: “Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be wealthier than average.” Of course, more than 50% of individuals can be wealthier than average. Consider that you have a very small number of very poor people and the rest clustering around the middle class. The mean will be lower than the median. Take a population of 10 people, 9 having a net worth of $30,000 and 1 having a net worth of $1,000. The average net worth is $27,100 and 9 out of 10 people will have above average wealth.

That Logic was invented by a philosopher is a significant fact. Many a profession could claim the indispensability of clear thinking for sound practice. So why was logic not invented by an admiral or a general, or by a physician or a physicist? Why indeed was logic not invented by a mathematician: why is Aristotle not the Gottlob Frege of the ancient world? Logos is nothing if not a corrective to common sense. Logos has an inherent obligation to surprise. It began with the brilliant speculations of the Pythagoreans-- the original neopythagoreans, as one wag has put it--with regard to a number theoretic ontology. Apart from the physicists, the great majority of influential practitioners of logos before Plato allowed logos to operate at two removes from common sense. The first was the remove at which speculative science itself would achieve a degree of theoretical maturity. But the second remove was from science itself. The first philosophers were unique among the practitioners of logos in that they created a crisis for logos. In the hands of the sophists, philosophy had become its own unique problem. It was unable to contain the unbridled argumentative and discursive fire-power of logos. In fact, philosophy has had this same sort of problem--the problem of trying to salvage itself from its excesses--off and on ever since. Thus, logic was invented by a philosopher because it was a philosopher who knew best the pathological problematic that philosophy had itself created. -Eds. Dov Gabbay & John Woods. (2004) John Woods & Andrew Irvine. "Aristotle's Early Logic." Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 1: Greek and Indian Logic. PP. 27-100.

Ja visas sirdis, kapos žuvušās, Reiz vienā kaudzē sakrautu, Vai zini tu, Ja aizdedz tās,- Cik krāsu liesma iznāktu?

Nevertheless, Spinoza does find a way of making room for a kind of freedom, though it is not of the sort that philosophers are used to. Each individual, says Spinoza, is a localised concentration of the attributes of reality, really a quasi-individual, since the only true individual is the universe in totality. Insofar as the quasi-individual is ruled by his emotions, he is unfree and at the mercy of finite understanding. To become free, the individual must, by means of rational reflection, understand the extended causal chain that links everything as one. To become aware of the totality of the universe is to be freed, not from causal determinism, but from an ignorance of one’s true nature.

I don't obey the law, I write them. I am the school where reformers, And public servants learn the rudiments. I am the university where scientists, Shrinks 'n philosophers develop sapience. I am the cosmic record that makes, Monks and theologians grow sentience. I am the end of all half-knowledge, I am the beginning of sight beyond sight. Whoever finds me in their heart's mirror, Can never be tamed by apish fright.

Poetry and Philosophy (The Sonnet) Good poetry is but philosophy, Good philosophy is but poetry. It is only the majority amateurs, Who insist on a divided duality. Poetry is not about the rhyming, Philosophy is not about profundity. A warm philosopher is walking poetry, A gentle poet is walking philosophy. Poetry is the most potent form of philosophy, As it brings illumination through simplicity. Anybody can make things sound more complicated, Only the best philosophers can write good poetry. In philosophy, deeper we go, simpler things get. Philosopher talks of light, poet swims in it.

Himalayan Sonneteer Sonnet 9 I don't obey the law, I write them. I am the school where reformers, And public servants learn the rudiments. I don't follow science, I am science. I am the university where scientists, Shrinks 'n philosophers develop sapience. I believe in no God, I am walking Godliness. I am the cosmic record that makes, Monks and theologians grow sentience. I am the end of all half-knowledge, I am the beginning of sight beyond sight. Whoever finds me in their heart's mirror, Can never be tamed by apish fright.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 1 Earth is but a bedlam, All the beings are loonies. We are so engrossed in prejudice, Integration feels like blasphemy. We still cannot live side by side, We want it all for ourselves. We won't even move a single inch, When it comes to our opinion and ways. Selfishness, thy name is Sapiens, Upon its norm we philosophize kindness. We invented fancy terms like altruism, Lest we're infected with common humanness. Humanity is too alive to be bound by ism. Dead things can be dogmatized, not expansion.

Give me a keyboard, I'll give you revolution.

Dropout Scientist (The Sonnet) I am a scientist who doesn't have a degree, I am a poet who has no control over words. I am a philosopher who has no intellect whatsoever, I am a monk with no idea, what it means to be religious. If I am being honest, I have no clue what I am, And I know quite well that you do not know either. But believe you me my friend, one day in sheer awe, Your descendants will come up with the rightful answer. In my 30 years of life, I've traveled quite a distance, Which will take the world at least a millennium to cover. That's why archaic designations fall short to define life, No designation is qualified to define a being beyond border. My faith is humanity, my reason is humanity, my love is humanity. I am but a glimpse of the future, without coldness and rigidity.

Regarding your remark that the name of Kant doesn’t belong in a mathematical dissertation: you will see that the 'Foundations' of Russell deal repeatedly with Kant, & that ‘The Principles of Mathematics’ of Couturat are completed with an Appendix of over 100 pages about Kant. And when you compare the Transcendental Aesthetics of Kant to these, you will see that he speaks about exactly the same things as Russell and Couturat. And Poincaré points out that the present struggle about the foundations is a continuation of the old mathematical-philosophical controversy between Kant & Leibniz. Even though the name of Kant can be avoided here—his subjects are touched upon; is it then necessary to avoid his name because he is known as a philosopher? (Brouwer, 1906 letter to Korteweg)

Imagination without reason is mere fancy, but reason without imagination is sterile.

The People in this Book: What Did They Do? NUMBER OF PERSONS FIELD OF ENDEAVOR ON MAIN LIST Scientists & Inventors ............................... 36 Political & Military Leaders ....................... 31 Secular Philosophers ................................. 14 Religious Leaders ..................................... 11 Artistic & Literary Figures .......................... 5 Explorers ................................................ 2 Industrialists ............................................ 1 TOTAL ...................•...... 100

To lovers out there ... A relationship must be 10 percent looks and 90 percent feelings, but some people have made it 100 percent about looks .That is why their relationship is always failing every time. Their relationship is about looks, not feelings. They end up looking at the wrong places and looking at the wrong people. They want their relationship to look like so and so relationship. They want their love to look certain way not to feel a certain way. Looks are deceiving and looks keep changing. Most relationship are toxic, bad, emotional draining, hurting, even when people look happy in them.

At the heart of the first set of capabilities is Polyani’s Paradox, which refers to a comment made by chemist and philosopher Michael Polyani that ‘We know more than we can tell’. In other words, a significant amount of human knowledge is tacit and therefore cannot be written down in the form of instructions, so cannot be replicated by AI and robotics.

Sonnet 1142 Naskar the scientist says, Science that lifts no human condition, is not science but superstition. Naskar the monk says, Inclusion is illumination, discrimination is delusion. Naskar the philosopher says, Better lose truth, than lose humanity - Better lose truth, than lose love. Naskar the sufi says, Sense yourself till you sense nothing but love. Naskar the humanist says, I don't care about your belief or disbelief, all I care about is your behavior with others. Naskar the humanitarian says, each human must earn their admission into the human race with humane actions. The spirit of love speaks of love, no matter the faith and field. Hate is but a mark of narrowness - When you expand heart and soul, whole world becomes kin and kith.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 2 Truth is the pandemic, Truth is the terror. My truth versus your truth, Your truth versus another. We speak of truth as if it's a constant, We chase it as antidote to our insecurity. Most of our truths bring not understanding, We cook up truth to fan our self-centricity. Truth, in truth, is the opposite of stagnation, Contraction repels all hope for understanding. Truth is not a fixed point, but an act in motion, Truth is the courageous act of a mind expanding. Hence, to seek security one must not seek truth. To seek truth, with security you must cut all truce.

Another tenet of the Gita is nonattachment to results. As Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, tells Arjuna: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” Sever work from outcome, the Gita teaches. Invest 100 percent effort into every endeavor and precisely zero percent into the results. Gandhi summed up this outlook in a single word: “desirelessness.” It is not an invitation to indolence. The karma yogi is a person of action. She is doing a lot, except worrying about results. This is not our way. We are results-oriented. Fitness trainers, business consultants, doctors, colleges, dry cleaners, recovery programs, dieticians, financial advisors. They, and many others, promise results. We might question their ability to deliver results, but rarely do we question the underlying assumption that being results-oriented is good. Gandhi was not results-oriented. He was process-oriented. He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence.

To lovers out there … A hurting relationship is a relationship that one is 100 percent fully concentrating on another person, and a good working relationship is a relationship that is 50/50. 50 is concentrating on another person and another 50 is concentrating on yourself.

The finite and the infinite are “incommensurable” (not related even by proper analogy); there is no proportion between them. Precision, or clarity, or exactness, is simply impossible here. All distinctions between

Rene Descartes, the famous French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, was born in 1596, in the village of La Haye.

Your happiness depends on the quality of your thoughts.

Failing to be American (The Sonnet) I've tried to rekindle the American sentiment of my early days of writing, but in vain. Once you wake up to the vastness of the world, it is impossible to revert to the tribal lane. I broke into the world scene as a westerner but, Naskar the American writer exists no longer. Today Naskar is but an Earth philosopher, There is only Naskar the Earth reformer. In the early years when I wrote on America, I used to write as an American writer. Today when I write on any nation, I write as an Earth writer. The whole world is my diary, I am the world's destiny. Try as they might to maintain prejudice, I am the line between humanity and nationality.

Visvamuslim (The Sonnet) I'm a scientist at brain, poet and monk at heart, philosopher at conscience. If this tickles you the wrong way, it's a sign of your medievalness. Now I'm gonna tell you something, which will make even less sense, unless you're a human of the future, beyond the gutter of nation-n-sects. I'm a muslim poet, a humanitarian scientist, and an advaitin philosopher. Figure this out, and you'll crack the Naskar enigma. In an animal world of inherited division, I'm the human cure to all apish inkling. In this white heaven of fear and hate, I am forgiveness, I am Visvamuslim.

I'm a muslim poet, a humanitarian scientist, and an advaitin philosopher. Figure this out, and you'll crack the Naskar enigma.

I'm a muslim poet, a humanitarian scientist, and an advaitin philosopher.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato represents the starting point of Western political philosophy, and of much of our ethical and metaphysical thought as well.

Finding the good stuff can be done by exploiting survivor bias. As someone informed me, the good stuff is whatever costs more than $100 in a pawn shop or an antique store.

The Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli is notorious for his blunt advice that a ruler interested in maintaining and in creasing his power should make use of deceitfulness, cunning, and lies, combined with a ruthless use of force.

The famous philosopher J ean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Miracle Mejnu (The Sonnet) I reveal policy to politicians, I write the law for lawyers, I unfold order to the coppers, I light the psyche to shrinkers. I am justice to the activists, Common sense to the scientists, I'm illumination to philosophers, I am existence to existentialists. I am poetry to the poets, Bridge of culture to linguists. I am good news in seminaries, I am the human part of humanists. Who am I - or better yet, what am I? I am the heartquake to all halftruth. What am I, or just the same, who am I? Refugee of love, I am Miracle Mejnu.

The famous English philosopher John Locke was the first writer to put together in coherent form the basic ideas of constitutional democracy

Humans glance for the same reason other animals sniff: it’s how we probe our surroundings. Glancing also reveals unexpected wonders. The words “surface” and “surprise” share a linguistic root. Glancing is our natural state. Our eyes are rarely still, even when we think they are. They make rapid jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly in between. Our eyes typically move at least three times per second: roughly 100,000 times per day.

PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ SŪTRAS The Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, or Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, are a body of self-consciously related works dealing with the subject of the new prajñā, or wisdom, taught by the Mahāyāna. Instrumental in the origins of the Mahāyāna itself, some texts from this category are among the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras, probably originating in the 1st century BCE. Four phases have been identified in the growth of this body of texts:122 (a) 100BCE–100CE: the Ratnaguṇasaṁcayagāthā and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā (8,000 lines). (b) 100–300CE: a period of elaboration that produced versions in 18,000,25,000, and 100,000 lines (and possibly the Vajracchedikā). (c) 300–500CE: a period of condensation, producing, among others, the Heart Sūtra (although there is some evidence to suggest that this particular text was originally written in Chinese and then translated back into Sanskrit.123) (d) 500–1000CE: a period producing texts showing Tantric influences. The sūtras themselves offer no elaborate philosophical argument – just the assertion of the true way of things, which is that nothing has ultimate existence, not even the purportedly real dharmas of the Abhidharma analysis. A characteristic device of these sūtras is the creation of paradoxes by switching between the conventional and the ultimate perspectives. The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, and their dharmaśūnyatā position, were not accepted by all the adherents of the Bodhisattva Path.

Natural science produces ancestral statements, such as that the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, that the earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, that life developed on earth approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and that the earliest ancestors of the genus Homo emerged about 2 million years ago. Yet it is also generating an ever-increasing number of ‘descendent’ statements, such as that the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 billion years; that the earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billions years hence; that all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and that eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles. Philosophers should be more astonished by such statements than they seem to be, for they present a serious problem for post-Kantian philosophy.

Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who “conceive and meditate of pleasant things.

Grace deeply identified with Mead’s view that ideas evolve historically. “Unlike the average American teacher of philosophy of his day,” she wrote, Mead “urged his students to relate the ideas of the great philosophers to the periods in which they lived and the social problems which they faced.” 99 For example, in his book Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), a collection of lectures Mead delivered in his history of philosophy classes, Mead explained how the French Revolution conditioned or served as the context for the ideas of Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason appeared on the eve of the revolution, and Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Mind was published shortly after its conclusion. More generally, Grace described what appealed to her most about Mead’s intellectual project: “A fundamental problem of all men and therefore of all philosophy is the relation of the individual to the whole of things,” she wrote. “It is to the solution of this problem that Mead devotes his earnest attention.” 100 Grace’s analysis of Mead’s ideas—building on her study of Kant and Hegel—helped to solidify two valuable components of her philosophical vision. The first was to conceptualize a view of ideas in their connection with great advances or leaps forward in history. The second was to develop an analysis of how the individual self and the society develop in relation to each other. Grace’s dissertation thus marked a signal moment in her philosophical journey. Studying Mead propelled her to new stages of philosophic exploration and, more importantly, a newfound political activism. “In retrospect,” she wrote, “it seems clear that what attracted me to Mead was that he gave me what I needed in that period—a body of ideas that challenged and empowered me to move from a life of contemplation to a life of action.” 101 She would begin to construct this life of action in Chicago.

Not every leader is a philosopher, but each leader should cultivate a philosophical mindset.

The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.

King was not depressed because he “had” the illness of depression, this colleague remarked; he was depressed because of the extreme stress of living with the danger of death daily. This may be, or it could be that he had the disease of depression, or both. This problem can’t be easily dismissed: it is a profound dilemma that has exasperated philosophers for at least three centuries, since the philosopher David Hume starkly laid out this “problem of causation.” X happens; then Y happens; X happens; then Y happens; X happens; then Y happens. At some point, we conclude that X causes Y. But as Hume points out, this idea of “cause” only means the constant conjunction of X and Y. Someday, Y might not follow X, and our assumption of cause would be proven incorrect. But we cannot know whether this will happen or not. So in the meantime, we presume causation. In sum: saying something causes something else is always a probabilistic statement; one can never be 100 percent certain. So it is with all knowledge: with philosophy, science, psychiatry, and history.

But one night, while reading lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce, James decided to conduct a little experiment. In his diary, he wrote that he would spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his own life.

Now consider this. A small number of invertebrate species, a mere 2 percent of all species of insects, is capable of social behaviors that do rival in complexity many human social achievements. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are the prominent examples.10 Their genetically set and inflexible routines enable the survival of the group. They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson

21 As environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson puts it, “The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for living a meaningful life.”22 Historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed that global warming “calls us to visions of the human that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated.”23 Whether we are talking about ethics or politics, ontology or epistemology, confronting the end of the world as we know it dramatically challenges our learned perspectives and ingrained priorities. What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They cannot be graphed or quantified. They are philosophical problems par excellence. If, as Montaigne asserted, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age, for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene.24 The rub now is that we have to learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.

This problem, of the relationship between the void and matter, or in philosophical parlance, on the ontological status of space, would reappear much later in the protracted debates between Isaac Newton – who would uphold Democritus’ idea of absolute space as a kind of receptacle for matter – and Leibniz, who thought of space as merely a relation between physical objects. The history of the debate is interesting in its own right because, until Einstein, the general opinion amongst philosophers and scientists was that Democritus and Newton were correct, whereas it now seems that Parmenides, Leibniz and Einstein have the better of the argument.

Interestingly, Spinoza’s philosophy is both mystical, rational and theistic. Yet he was excommunicated from the Jewish community for his views, denounced as an atheist by Christians and declared so wicked that at one time his books were publicly burnt. Leibniz, who owes a great deal to him, rarely acknowledges the debt. Despite the rigour and integrity of his work, Spinoza remains one of the lesser studied and least regarded of all the rationalist philosophers.

Five years ago, I decided to eliminate my reactive behavior to irritations, but at first none of my tricks worked. I placed philosophical and inspirational quotes on my iPhone wallpaper or wrote in my journal, but the proverbs always lost their effectiveness over time. Then, one day, I told one of my clients who blamed her husband for everything to take 100 percent responsibility for her part in their interactions. “This way,” I said, “you will be free of trying to control him, and you will be able to find constructive solutions in your relationship.” When she left, I realized that the same advice could help me as well. Taking 100 percent personal responsibility would help me to stop blaming or complaining and achieve a sense of flow. It would also give me the clarity in any conversation to locate the right words to help a person to accept a hard choice.

I am justice to the activists, Common sense to the scientists, I'm illumination to philosophers, I am existence to existentialists.