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Sage | Source | Quote |
---|---|---|
Friedrich Nietzsche | Twilight of the Idols | Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral 'dignity' to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a 'return to nature'—to what did he really want to return?... what I hate is the Rousseauan morality — the so-called 'truths' of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. |
Ibn Khaldun | Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.” | |
Yuval Harari | Homo Deus | Success breeds ambition... The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more... Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier. |
Stephen Mitchell | Second Book of Tao | The ancient Masters… woke up, they ate, they worked, they made love, they raised their families, all the while unseduced by any thoughts. |
Arthur Schopenhauer | the difficulty is… that something can be both true and untrue at the same time… mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity. | |
Ursula Le Guin | The Lathe of Heaven | The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. |
Fu Xi | I Ching | The heart thinks constantly. This cannot be changed, but the movements of the heart – that is, a man’s thoughts – should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore |
Haruki Murakami | 1Q84 | the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive. |
Shan Dao | The more we believe the words, the less we understand the sense | |
Ursula Le Guin | Lao Tzu - A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way | The prize thrown away by the aggressor is compassion. |
David Mitchell | Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet | The soul is a verb, not a noun. |
Rumi | There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of true nature stays where it's always been | |
Huineng | Sutra of Huineng | There is nothing true anywhere, the True is nowhere to be found… When the True is left to itself, there is nothing false in it for it is Mind itself.” |
Mary Wollstonecraft | this homage to women’s attractions has distorted their understanding to such an extent that almost all the civilized women of the present century are anxious only to inspire love, when they ought to have the nobler aim of getting respect for their abilities and virtues. | |
Carl Jung | time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, like in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions. | |
Steven Pinker | Enlightenment Now | Two centuries ago, 12% of the world could read and write; today 85% can. Literacy and education will soon be universal, for girls as well as for boys. |
Jonathan Swift | Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. | |
Henry Miller | We all derive from the same source… We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. | |
Louis D. Brandeis | We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. | |
Ursula Le Guin | Lavinia | We make a desert and call it progress. |