Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.  I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

Ted Chiang, Exhalation

Jesus said:  If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. 

The Gospel of Thomas, as noted by Elaine Pagels

Our struggle in life requires two virtues, bravery and wisdom -- readiness to endure a danger and skillful knowledge of how to manage it.

Gorgias (the Sophist)

There are intelligible principles inherent in the matter of every phenomenon; because matter is essentially the sum of all the seemings that it has for any and all persons. 

Protagoras (the Sophist)

All things must be either limiting, or unlimited, or both limiting and unlimited.  Since things cannot consist either of the limiting alone or of the unlimited alone ... we must obviously conclude that the universe and its contents are fitted together and harmonized by a combination of the limiting and the unlimited.

For if everything that is were unlimited, there would not be anything of such a character that it could be recognized.

Philolaus  (a Pythagorean)

The wind is blowing; adore the wind.

From the Pythagorean symbola

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments.
 
The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory. 

Montaigne

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

Montaigne

Man is a small kosmos.

Democritus, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

In everything there is a portion of everything else.

Anaxagoras, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national, and constrained to the ends of government.

Montaigne

Content yourself ... to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

Montaigne

I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature, and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation. 

Montaigne

To be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.... Thought and being are the same.

Parmenides, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.

Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.

Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

Jia Tolentino, as quoted in the New York Review by Jonathan Lethem

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

There is nothing wrong in drinking as much as a man can hold without having to be taken home by a servant, unless of course he is very old.  The man to be praised is he who, after drinking, can still express thoughts that are noble and well arranged.

Xenophranes, per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

While sitting at the fireside in the winter, at ease on soft couches, well fed, sipping tasty wine and nibbling tidbits, it is then that a host may duly inquire of his guest:  Who are you among men, and whence do you come?

Xenophanes, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

To see into thy nature, O Zeus, is baffling to the mind. I have been praying to thee without knowing whether thou art necessity or nature or simply the intelligence of mortals. 

Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics

Reality

"Reality" [is] a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot "wish them away).... [an] order [that] is relative to a particular socio-historical situation [but] appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil life, are in my opinion very discreet.

Montaigne

It is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.

Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

 

The "good"... does not stand for anything that is empirically given.  It always grows out of an impasse, at a moment of indecision; thus it is always the product of a question: what is the good.


Bruno Snell on Socrates

Man's knowledge is imperfect, but the wisdom of god is faultless. 'He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole.'

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes