Lines to keep

“In what then is the ether woven, like warp and woof?”

— Gargi Vachaknavi
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.8.7, trans. F. Max Müller

“The journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step.”

— Laozi
Daodejing, chapter 64, trans. James Legge

“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”

— Confucius
Analects 15.24 (15.23 in Legge’s numbering), trans. James Legge

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.”

— Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
Dhammapada, verse 1, trans. F. Max Müller

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

— Socrates
Plato, Apology 38a, the common rendering of Benjamin Jowett’s “the life which is unexamined is not worth living”

“The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order.”

— Mozi (Mo Di)
Mozi, book 4, “Universal Love I,” trans. W. P. Mei (1929)

“The beginning is the most important part of any work.”

— Plato
Republic, book 2 (377a), trans. Benjamin Jowett

“I am a citizen of the world.”

— Diogenes
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 6.63, trans. R. D. Hicks

“All men by nature desire to know.”

— Aristotle
Metaphysics, book 1, trans. W. D. Ross

“The feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence.”

— Mencius (Mengzi)
Mencius 2A.6, trans. James Legge

“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

— Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi, chapter 2, trans. Herbert Giles (1889)

“Death is nothing to us.”

— Epicurus
Letter to Menoeceus 124

“Not having learned it is not as good as having learned it; having learned it is not as good as having seen it carried out; having seen it is not as good as understanding it; understanding it is not as good as doing it.”

— Xunzi
Xunzi, chapter 8, trans. Homer H. Dubs, The Works of Hsüntze (1928)

“To govern the state by law is to praise the right and blame the wrong.”

— Han Fei
Han Feizi, chapter 6, “Having Regulations,” trans. W. K. Liao, The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu (1939)

“Such friendship enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and sharing it.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero
On Friendship, section 6, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh

“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters to Lucilius 1, trans. Richard M. Gummere

“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”

— Epictetus
Enchiridion 1, trans. George Long

“The universe is transformation: life is opinion.”

— Marcus Aurelius
Meditations 4.3, trans. George Long

“Neither from itself nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything whatever, anywhere arise.”

— Nagarjuna
Mulamadhyamakakarika 1.1, trans. Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995)

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

— Augustine of Hippo
Confessions 11.14, trans. E. B. Pusey

“Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?”

— Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
The Consolation of Philosophy, book 2, prose 4, trans. H. R. James

“Whence can be found leather enough to cover the whole earth?”

— Shantideva
Bodhicaryavatara, chapter 5, trans. L. D. Barnett, The Path of Light (1909)

“Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the body; in health, when not in health; the means by which health is likely to be lost; and, when lost, is likely to be restored.”

— Ibn Sina
The Canon of Medicine, book 1, opening definition

“For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.”

— Anselm of Canterbury
Proslogion, chapter 1, trans. Sidney Norton Deane

“The thirst for knowledge was innate in me from an early age; it was like a second nature implanted by God, without any will on my part.”

— Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
Deliverance from Error, in The Confessions of Al Ghazzali, trans. Claud Field (1909)

“Truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.”

— Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
The Decisive Treatise, chapter 2, trans. George F. Hourani (1961)

“Read one view before reading another.”

— Zhu Xi
Classified Sayings of Master Zhu (Zhuzi yulei) 12:211, trans. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (1993)

“Know that the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.”

— Moses Maimonides
The Guide for the Perplexed, part 1, chapter 58, trans. M. Friedländer

“To study the self is to forget the self.”

— Eihei Dogen
Genjokoan, in the Shobogenzo, trans. Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi

“Listen to this reed how it complains: it is telling a tale of separations.”

— Jalal al-Din Rumi
Masnavi, book 1, line 1, trans. R. A. Nicholson

“Reason is to man what God is to the world.”

— Thomas Aquinas
On Kingship, book 1, chapter 12 [13], trans. Gerald B. Phelan, rev. I. Th. Eschmann (1949)

“Plurality must never be posited without necessity.”

— William of Ockham
Commentary on the Sentences, book 1, distinction 27, question 2 (“Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate”), as rendered in Wikipedia’s “Occam’s razor”

“It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments.”

— Ibn Khaldun
The Muqaddimah, chapter 3, section 36, trans. Franz Rosenthal (1958)

“It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince, chapter 17, trans. W. K. Marriott

“What do I know?”

— Michel de Montaigne
His motto, “Que sais-je?”, from Essays 2.12, trans. Charles Cotton

“I think, therefore I am.”

— René Descartes
Discourse on the Method (1637), part 4, trans. John Veitch

“I have learnt more while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars.”

— Zera Yacob
Hatata (1667), trans. Claude Sumner, as quoted in Wikipedia’s “Zera Yacob (philosopher)”

“But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

— Baruch Spinoza
Ethics, part 5, last line, trans. R. H. M. Elwes

“If Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more.”

— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Reply to Sor Filotea (1691), trans. Pamela Kirk Rappaport

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

— Voltaire
Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 28 November 1770, trans. S. G. Tallentyre

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

— David Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature, book 2, part 3, section 3

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract, book 1, chapter 1, trans. G. D. H. Cole

“Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

— Immanuel Kant
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section 2, trans. T. K. Abbott

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

— Jeremy Bentham
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17, note (1823 edition)

“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter 4

“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosophy of Right (1820), preface, trans. S. W. Dyde

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer
Studies in Pessimism, “Further Psychological Observations”, trans. T. Bailey Saunders

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

— John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism (1863), chapter 2

“It is quite true, as philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards; but one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard
Journals, 1843 (Papirer IV A 164); the site’s own translation from the Danish

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

— Karl Marx
Theses on Feuerbach (1845), thesis 11

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

— William James
The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter 11

“If a man knows the wherefore of his existence, then the manner of it can take care of itself.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Missiles 12, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici

“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

— Henri Bergson
Creative Evolution (1907), chapter 1, trans. Arthur Mitchell

“A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

— John Dewey
Democracy and Education (1916), chapter 7

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

— Alfred North Whitehead
Process and Reality (1929), part 2, chapter 1

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), chapter 2, opening words

“The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree.”

— Mohandas Gandhi
Hind Swaraj (1909), chapter 16

“I have always been a miner of ore; I have never managed to refine it.”

— Nishida Kitaro
Preface to Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness (1958), trans. Robert Schinzinger

“All actual life is encounter.”

— Martin Buber
I and Thou (1923), trans. Walter Kaufmann

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”

— Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac (1949), The Land Ethic

“Educate, agitate, organise.”

— B. R. Ambedkar
Closing words of his speech to the All-India Depressed Classes Conference, Nagpur, July 1942, as reported by Dhananjay Keer

“All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”

— Antonio Gramsci
Prison Notebooks, “The Intellectuals,” trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)

“Existence precedes essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), trans. Philip Mairet

“…the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

— Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), chapter 15, last sentence

“Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”

— Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity (1961), preface, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1969), p. 21

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

— Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex (1949), trans. H. M. Parshley

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

— Simone Weil
Letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942, as quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal

“I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?””

— Alan Turing
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), first line

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), trans. Justin O’Brien

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

— Nelson Mandela
Long Walk to Freedom (1994)

“It is an insult and it may be an injury not to be believed.”

— G. E. M. Anscombe
“What Is It to Believe Someone?” (1979)

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

— Iris Murdoch
The Sublime and the Good (1959)

“The man who rejects morality because he sees no reason to obey its rules can be convicted of villainy but not of inconsistency.”

— Philippa Foot
“Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972), in Virtues and Vices (1978), p. 161

“To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it.”

— Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), chapter 3, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

— John Rawls
A Theory of Justice (1971), section 1

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

— Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952), closing line, trans. Charles Lam Markmann

“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

— Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish (1975), part 1, chapter 1, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977), p. 30

“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.”

— Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), prologue

“Ethical life is important, but it can see that things other than itself are important.”

— Bernard Williams
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), p. 184

“Reconciliation is, in fact, a form of consensus.”

— Kwasi Wiredu
“Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-party Polity,” Polylog (2000), section 3

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.”

— Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), chapter 20

“Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”

— Daniel Dennett
Consciousness Explained (1991)

“When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared.”

— Derek Parfit
Reasons and Persons (1984), section 95

“We can as well start afresh by interviewing sage Africans and eliciting philosophical expositions from them.”

— Henry Odera Oruka
“Mythologies as African Philosophy” (1972), reprinted in Sagacious Reasoning (1997), p. 30

“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

— Martha Nussbaum
Upheavals of Thought (2001), introduction

“To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer
“The Serviceberry,” Emergence Magazine (2022)

“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.”

— David Chalmers
“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies (1995)

“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”

— Epictetus
Enchiridion 5, trans. George Long

“Stand a little out of my sun.”

— Diogenes
to Alexander the Great, in Plutarch, Life of Alexander 14, trans. Bernadotte Perrin

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

— Immanuel Kant
Groundwork 4:421, trans. James W. Ellington

“The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.”

— Laozi
Daodejing 1, after the translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

“For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”

— Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
Dhammapada 5, trans. F. Max Müller

“A person is a person through other persons.”

— Nguni proverb

“The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

— Hobbes
Leviathan, chapter 13

“Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness.”

— Nagarjuna
Mulamadhyamakakarika 24.18, trans. Jay L. Garfield

“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”

— Hannah Arendt
The Life of the Mind, volume 1 (Thinking), Part III, section 18