Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.

 

Half of what I say is meaningless; 

but I say it so that the other half may reach you

 

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

 

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

 

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; 

and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price

 

If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees

 

Never apologize for burning too brightly or collapsing into yourself every night. 

That is how galaxies are made

 

It is not God that is worshipped but the authority that claims to speak in His name. 

Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity

 

Study yourself. 

Become your own mentor and best friend. 

When you are suffering stay at the bottom until you find out who you are. 

Let the storms come and pass. 

How you walk through the fire says a lot about you. 

Nobody likes a victimhood mentality 

and what happened to you is not important

. It is about how you use your chaos that matters. 

The dawn will come

 

You can believe in whatsoever you like,

 but the truth remains the truth,

 no matter how sweet the lie may taste.

Desiderata

 

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, 

and remember what peace there may be in silence. 

As far as possible, without surrender, 

be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; 

and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant;

 they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; 

they are vexatious to the spirit.

 If you compare yourself with others, 

you may become vain or bitter,

 for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. 

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;

 it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,

 for the world is full of trickery. 

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;

 many persons strive for high ideals, 

and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. 

Especially do not feign affection. 

Neither be cynical about love; 

for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,

 it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,

 gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.

 But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.

 Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. 

You are a child of the universe 

no less than the trees and the stars; 

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, 

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God, 

whatever you conceive Him to be. 

And whatever your labors and aspirations,

 in the noisy confusion of life,

 keep peace in your soul. 

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,

 it is still a beautiful world. 

Be cheerful.

 Strive to be happy.

 

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. 

But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth.

 Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

 

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, 

but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion

 

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. 

The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering,

 the barriers against possession not so insurmountable,

 the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. 

With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies.

 But with every being the primal emotions are there.

 All men have an emotion to kill; 

when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. 

never killed any one, 

 read some obituary notices with great satisfaction

Dark (doesn't) Matter

 

Scientists talk about dark matter, 

the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars.

 Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is.

 Well I do. 

It's apathy. 

That's the truth of it; 

pile together everything we know and care about in the universe 

and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of 

Who Gives a Fuck.

 

there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.

 

Sometimes you can't help people. 

Sometimes it's better not even to try.

 

So you think that money is the root of all evil? 

Have you ever asked what is the root of money? 

Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them.

 Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. 

Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. 

Money is made possible only by the men who produce.

 Is this what you consider evil?

Existentialism

 

a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the issue of human existence.

 Existentialist philosophers explore questions related to the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence.

 Common concepts in existentialist thought include 

existential crisis, 

dread, 

and anxiety in the face of an absurd world,

 as well as authenticity, courage, and virtue.

critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with the problem of meaning

Søren Kierkegaard 

Friedrich Nietzsche 

 Fyodor Dostoevsky, 

 Jean-Paul Sartre, 

 Simone de Beauvoir, 

Sartre posits the idea that

 "what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence

 Sartre described existentialism as 

"the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism."

For others, existentialism need not involve the rejection of God, but rather 

"examines mortal man's search for meaning in a meaningless universe," 

considering less "What is the good life?" (to feel, be, or do, good), 

instead asking "What is life good for?

individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived through preconceived and a priori categories, an "essence".

 Human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life

in contradiction to Aristotle and Aquinas who taught that essence precedes individual existence

the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things

people are defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions

Someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons). This is opposed to their genes, or human nature, bearing the blame.

"Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards." The more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: a person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person

 it belongs to the essence of a house to keep the bad weather out, which is why it has walls and a roof. Humans are different from houses because—unlike houses—they do not have an inbuilt purpose: they are free to choose their own purpose and thereby shape their essence; thus, their existence precedes their essence

an essence is the relational property of having a set of parts ordered in such a way as to collectively perform some activity

freedom: nothing fixes our purpose but we ourselves, our projects have no weight or inertia except for our endorsement of them

Simone de Beauvoir, holds that there are various factors, grouped together under the term sedimentation, that offer resistance to attempts to change our direction in life. Sedimentations are themselves products of past choices and can be changed by choosing differently in the present, but such changes happen slowly. They are a force of inertia that shapes the agent's evaluative outlook on the world until the transition is complete

The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world.

opposes the traditional Abrahamic religious perspective, which establishes that life's purpose is the fulfillment of God's commandments. This is what gives meaning to people's lives

 To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man's existence since there is nothing to be discovered.

life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit

absurdity is limited to actions and choices of human beings. These are considered absurd since they issue from human freedom, undermining their foundation outside of themselves

The absurd contrasts with the claim that "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person

 Because of the world's absurdity, anything can happen to anyone at any time and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the absurd

helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. 

The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy

It has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists. 

The ultimate hero of absurdism lives without meaning and faces suicide without succumbing to it

Facticity is a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one did not choose (birthplace, etc.), but a condition of freedom in the sense that one's values most likely depend on it. 

the value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person

to disregard one's facticity during the continual process of self-making, projecting oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself and would be inauthentic.

Authenticity involves the idea that one has to "create oneself" and live in accordance with this self. 

For an authentic existence, one should act as oneself, not as "one's acts" or as "one's genes" or as any other essence requires.

 The authentic act is one in accordance with one's freedom

 The Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does

The world is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things. 

This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look

In Sartre's example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole, the man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in. 

He is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room.

 Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. 

He is then filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing—as a Peeping Tom.

 For Sartre, this phenomenological experience of shame establishes proof for the existence of other minds and defeats the problem of solipsism. 

For the conscious state of shame to be experienced, one has to become aware of oneself as an object of another look, proving a priori, that other minds exist.

The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.

Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is possible that the creaking floorboard was simply the movement of an old house; the Look is not some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the Other sees one (there may have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that person). 

It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him

"Existential angst", sometimes called existential dread, anxiety, or anguish

negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. 

The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. 

In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.

angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object.

 While one can take measures to remove an object of fear, for angst no such "constructive" measures are possible. 

The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions and to the fact that, in experiencing freedom as angst, one also realizes that one is fully responsible for these consequences.

Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope.

In existentialism, it is more specifically a loss of hope in reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity.

What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they are not overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are in perpetual despair

Hercules

 

What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? 

What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. 

So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? 

What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?

 

He who is in harmony with the Tao
is like a newborn child.

Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,
but its grip is powerful.

It doesn't know about the union
of male and female,
yet its penis can stand erect,
so intense is its vital power.

It can scream its head off all day,
yet it never becomes hoarse,
so complete is its harmony.


The Master's power is like this.

He lets all things come and go
effortlessly, without desire.

He never expects results;
thus he is never disappointed.

He is never disappointed;
thus his spirit never grows old.

 

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 

No, I will not. 

This is wrong, 

and I don't care if you fire me,

 shoot me, 

pass me over for promotion,

 or call my mother, 

I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' 

Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?

 

We become so absorbed in our flaws and faults that we forget that it is better to be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. 

To have flaws is beauty in itself, 

a fact so frightening that we hurry to hide them from sight

 and tarnish the whole in the process of comparing ourselves to others.

 

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. 

To be prepared for surprise is to be educated

 

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. 

It is not happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural.

 It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life

 

What then is truth? 

A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms:

 in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. 

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions 

— they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Flow

 

If you can't fight and you can't flee, flow.

 

I take no pride in hopeless longing; 

I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration.

 I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it

 

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind

 

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. 

Talking doesn't prove it

 

I’m lying here in a haystack... 

The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. 

And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... 

And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something...

 What chaos! 

What a farce!

never trust a man who doesn’t drink

 

never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. 

Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world.

 They’re the judges, the meddlers. 

And never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk.

 They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, 

either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent

. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. 

 

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance

 

The flame that burns half as long 

burns twice as bright 

 

Don't explain your philosophy. 

Embody it.

 

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. 

He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. 

Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,"

 and I think that he's kind of nutty. 

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe.

 Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. 

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees.

 I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty.

 I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. 

The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color.

 It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? 

Why is it aesthetic? 

All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. 

It only adds.

 I don't understand how it subtracts.

 

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . 

If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? 

And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? 

What about the world of a schizophrenic? 

Maybe it's as real as our world. 

Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. 

The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication 

... and there is the real illness.

 

Man is a mystery.

 It needs to be unravelled, 

and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, 

don't say that you've wasted time.

 

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. 

The point, however, is to change it.

 

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Curiosity has its own reason for existing

 

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; 

but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, 

so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each

 

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; 

it is a profound source of spirituality.

 

We are addicted to our thoughts. 

We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking

 

A truth that's told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

 

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. 

If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .

If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, 

and to take as many people with us as we can

 

Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world