Philosophize This!

His students collected a ton of his most insightful and wise statements and compiled them into a book called the Insuridian or the Handbook.

By far the most popular work by Seneca, and my favorite to read, is called On Anger.

No plague has cost the human race more than anger.

Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order, if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect, what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao

I do not know its name and address it as Tao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. Being great implies reaching out in space. Reaching out in space implies far-reaching. Far-reaching implies reversion to the original point.

Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two give birth to Three. Three give birth to 10,000 things

Not exalting worth keeps the people from rivalry. Not prizing what is hard to procure keeps the people from theft. Not to show them what they may covet is the way to keep their minds from disorder

Learn what one can and stop searching on what one cannot is the best way

My life is limited, but knowledge is unlimited. If I pursue unlimited knowledge with my own limited life, the result must be dangerous. If one has realized this, but still does so, the result must be even more dangerous

And that is false, from another point of view. Are there really it and other? Or really no it and other? Where neither it nor other finds its opposite is called the axis of the way. When once the axis is found at the center of the circle, there is no limit to responding with either. On the one hand, no limit to what is it. On the other, no limit to what is not.

To put that into perspective, That is about the same as the entire Harry Potter book franchise Combined with the entire Fifty Shades of Grey franchise

A syllogism is discourse in which, certain things being stated Something other than what is stated follows a necessity from there being so I mean by the last phrase that they produce the consequence And by this, that no further term is required from without In order to make the consequence necessary I call that a perfect syllogism which needs nothing other than what has been stated To make plain what necessarily follows A syllogism is imperfect if it needs either one or more propositions Which are indeed the necessary consequences of the term set down But have not been expressly stated as premises

But just like in the case of the double bacon cheeseburger...What we desire and what we see as good is not actually good for us

The word symposium means a drinking party Plato writes about a fancy dinner party where several people take turns after dinner Standing up in front of the group and giving their thoughts on and trying to get to one of these deep Socratic definitions of the concept of love

Behold human beings living in an underground den which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den here They have been from their childhood and have their legs and next chain So they cannot move and can only see before them being prevented by the chains from turning around their heads Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance and between the fire and the prisoners There is a raised way and you will see if you look a low wall built along the way like the screen which marionette players Have in front of them over which they show the puppets end quote

While still blinking through the gloom and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness He is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice Or the images that cast the shadows and to wrangle and debate About the notions of these things in the minds of those who have never seen justice itself End quote

Just as different drugs draw forth different humors from the body some putting a stop to disease, others to life so too with words Some cause pain, others joy some strike fear some stir the audience to boldness some be numb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion

I am wiser than this man It is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile But he thinks he knows something when he does not Whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know So I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent That I do not think I know what I do not know

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man Yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know

I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking And that examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do

Quote. End quote.

tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, how we might become cognizant of that suffering and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action

what is preferable about the world of Greek tragedy is that it's a polytheistic world with a diversity of conflicting and deeply flawed gods and rival conceptions of the good. It is my conviction that the lesson of the adversarial reasoning of tragedy is that it is prudent to abandon any notion of monotheism, whether it's either of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, a Platonic monotheism rooted in the metaphysical primacy of the good, or indeed the secular monotheism of liberal democracy and human rights that still circles around a weak deistic conception of God. The motto on the back of the dollar bill might be slightly improved if it read, 'In gods we trust and sometimes distrust.' Admittedly this is not very catchy.