Nuggets Of Wisdom From Nietzche, Spinoza, Aristotle, And More

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

Simone de Beauvoir, writer, philosopher and social theorist

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, philosopher

Liberty is a great celestial goddess, strong, beneficent and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class. Liberty will never descend upon earth in the outer matters until she has descended into the hearts of men and until the higher spirit which is free has dominated the lower nature, the nature of passions and strong desires, and the will to hold for oneself and to trample upon others. You can only have a free nation, when you have free men to build it out of free men and women both.

Annie Besant, theosophist

Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings … For communication is not announcing things … Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated … the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.

John Dewey, philosopher and educational reformer

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

Baruch de Spinoza, philosopher

One swallow does not make a summer, neither does a fine day; similarly, one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Aristotle, philosopher

Any pride or haughtiness is displeasing to us, merely because it shocks our own pride, and leads us by sympathy into comparison, which causes the disagreeable passion of humility.

David Hume, historian, economist and essayist

Let's face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.

Judith Butler, philosopher and gender theorist

The noble lover of beauty engages in love wherever he sees excellence and splendid natural endowment without regard for any different in physiological detail ... The lover of human beauty [will] be fairly and equably disposed towards both sexes, instead of supposing that males and females are as different in the matter of love as they are in their clothes.

Plutarch, biographer and essayist