Explore my curated collection of insights, proverbs, memes, and jokes from diverse cultures and time periods. From philosophy and literature to everyday wisdom, discover timeless thoughts that inspire and provoke contemplation. Dive into the fragments of wisdom that shape our understanding of the world. My aim is to keep it short and easy, making philosophy accessible and engaging for all.
It is my purpose to explain, not the meanings of words, but the nature of things, and to explain them in such words whose meanings, according to current use, are not debauched by the meaning which I wish to attach to them. ~ Spinoza, Ethics, Book III, Definition XX.
"This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are.” ~ Nietzsche
“Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.” ~ Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
“History is Philosophy teaching by examples” -Thucydides
History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. ~ James Joyce, Ulysses.
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” – Immanuel Kant
“To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” (Quine 1948)
Citizen of the Zoo in Saigon
Charlie just lost his Queen.
When leaves stop falling, fall starts leaving. ~ Japanese Proverb
In biology, cells multiply by dividing. ~ Anonymous
Nursery teacher : `When ice melts, what do you get ?' One boy answered : `Spring.'
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mysticism is the metaphysics for idiots. ~ Adorno
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. ~ Anais Nin
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” – Albert Camus
“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” – Socrates
In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not. Heraclitus (Fragment 49a)
The word "big" is not bigger than "little." - Anonymous
“What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know. If you ask me, I don’t know.” - Saint Augustine
What we saw and grasped, that we leave behind; but what we did not see and did not grasp, that we bring. Heraclitus (Fragment 56)
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation” – Jeremy Bentham
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination” – Immanuel Kant
“To be is to be perceived” (“Esse est percipi”) – George Berkeley
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. ~ Anonymous.
The Giraffe dance, Kruger National Park
Freedom for Turkeys!
The grass is always greener where you water it. ~Anonymous
"I've always wondered why meteorites land in craters." - Sabine Hossenfelder
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience” – John Locke
“God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us” – Niccolo Machiavelli
“Liberty consists in doing what one desires” – John Stuart Mill
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” – Bertrand Russell
Outside noisy; inside empty. ~ Chinese Proverb
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. ~ Anonymous
“The living are only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that.” Nietzsche
“God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.’ Immanuel Kant
‘The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.’ Alfred Hitchcock
Two wrongs do not make a right, but three lefts do.
Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology. ~ Adorno/Horkheimer
Chloe
Greenboy
Infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. ~ Emmanuel Levinas:
“I think therefore I am” (“Cogito, ergo sum”) – René Descartes
“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” – Martin Heidegger
But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep. — William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
It must have required many ages to discover that a pair of birds and a couple of days were both instances of the number 2: the degree of abstraction involved is far from easy. Bertrand Russell
'It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks about that proposition, it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards.' ~ Søren Kierkegaard
In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. 'What do they know all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka. - ' Isaac Bashevis Singer, 'The Letter Writer'
Kurt
Tommy
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ~Oscar Wilde
'When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized God doesn't work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness.' ~ Emo Philips
It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission. ~ Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
A man holding a cat by the tail is getting forty times the experience of a cat than a man watching him hold a cat. ~ Mark Twain.
The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible. ~ Albert Einstein
How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it. ~ Wittgenstein: in Zettel 255
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. ~ Walter Benjamin
The great way is not difficult. Do not seek the truth; Just cease cherishing opinions. --- Seng-Ts'an, 6th century Zen Ancestor.
"To religion would belong the task of consolation, not of demonstration." ~ Levinas
"The world, which was made for us, abides, but we, for whom it was made, depart." ~ Barukh