“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” ~Søren Kierkegaard

I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable, it is perhaps also desirable, that the philosopher should be a rare plant.. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”   ― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In the progress of knowledge the deep words of Heraclitus hold that the way upward and the way downward are one and the same: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μίη. Here, too, ascent and descent necessarily belong together: the direction of thought to the universal principles and grounds of knowledge finally proves not only compatible with its direction to the particularity of phenomena and facts, but the correlate and condition of the latter. (Ernst Cassirer 1921 , p.444)

You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole form of the human condition. Montaigne, Essays, Book III, 2 

It is a task of philosophy to break the power of words over the human mind. Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift

All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Before we can understand language, we must strip it of its mystical and awe-inspiring attributes. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

“It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps…. I felt…a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot house onto a windswept headland. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass really is green. (Russell 1959, 22)

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.   - E. O. Wilson

We cannot think clearly about a plant or animal until we have a name for it.  E. O. Wilson

Descartes: I think, therefore I am.  Lacan: I think, therefore I am not.  

“Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.....Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.” Heidegger.

 The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?  --- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p.437 (German edition)

Blaise Pascal, Pensée #326: If he exalts himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, until he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster. 

Assmann, J. (2005). Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt: “Human beings are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge.”

Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916: Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship (II, 3): “If the citizens themselves devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honor, virtue’s reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted.” 

Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable: It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.”

Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea): Animals learn death first at the moment of death;…Man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.

Augustine, Confessions: “He was not utterly unskilled in handling his own lack of training, and he refused to be rashly drawn into a controversy about those matters from which there would be no exit nor an easy way of retreat. This was an additional ground for my pleasure. For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful than the things I was anxious to know about.” .

Augustine, Confessions: “After saying all that, what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What does anyone who speaks of you really say? Yet woe betide those who fail to speak, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing.”

Augustine, City of God, XIX.13: 'The peace of all things lies in the tranquility of order, and order is the disposition of equal and unequal things in such a way as to give to each its proper place” 

"It is not without importance to know—and this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century—whether the egalitarian and just State [and its politics] in which the European is fulfilled … proceeds from a war of all against all—or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other." (“Peace and Proximity,” 1984.  Emmanuel Levinas)

Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, On Sense-Certainty, Paragraph 95 -96:  Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date. The Now that is night is kept fixed, i.e. it is treated as what it is given out to be, as something which is; but it proves to be rather a something which is not. The Now itself no doubt maintains itself, but as what is not night; similarly, in its relation to the day which the Now is at present, it maintains itself as something that is also not day, or as altogether something negative. This self -maintaining Now is therefore not something immediate but something mediated; for, qua something that remains and preserves itself, it is determined through and by means of the fact that something else, namely day and night, is not. Thereby it is just as much as ever it was before. Now, and in being this simple fact, it is indifferent to what is still associated with it; just as little as night or day is its being, it is just as truly also day and night; it is not in the least affected by this otherness through which it is what it is. A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is a not-this, and with equal indifference this as well as that – a thing of this kind we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.

Here is Jung's reply to Hegel (1947):  "A philosophy like Hegel's is a self-revelation of psychic background and, philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically, it amounts to an invasion by the unconscious. The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics, who use terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searches wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the latest German philosopher from using the same crackpot power-words and pretending that it is not unintentional psychology.

Alain De Botton, commenting on Epicurus: "There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought.  In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge.  And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics:  confusion, displacement, surprise."